Issue #013 — What I learned launching a thing nobody asked for

Friend,

I launched a thing last autumn that nobody asked for.

I want to be careful with this letter, because the obvious story would be the redemptive one — the thing nobody asked for turned out to be exactly what they needed, and now look. That is not the story. The thing was a small product, a paid template, and it did modestly. Some people bought it. Most did not. It did not change my life. It might change someone else's, slightly, which is mostly why I made it.

What I want to write about is what I learned from making something that no audience was waiting for, because I think this is the case most of the time and we pretend otherwise.

The internet has convinced builders that you should validate before you build. Get the waitlist. Run the survey. Do customer development. There is a version of this that is true and useful, and a version that is a procrastination technology dressed up as discipline. I had spent two years in the second version. I had a folder of validated ideas I had not built.

So I built something on a hunch. The hunch was based on six conversations and my own twenty-year frustration with a specific problem. I gave myself eight weeks. I shipped on week nine. The launch was modest. I did not promote it well, which I now know is the part I find genuinely hard, not the building.

What I learned: the making taught me more about who would buy it than any survey could have. The first three buyers told me, in their feedback, exactly which of my assumptions were wrong. I could not have learned this from people who had not yet given me money. The shape of the product changed in version two in ways I could not have planned. Version three is what I am working on now.

Validation is not a stage you complete before building. It is a thing that happens through building, after building, around building. The myth of the pre-validated launch is mostly told by people whose first products did fine because their second or third one did. The first one was almost always closer to mine.

If you have a folder of unbuilt ideas, ship one of them small, by a date you have already named out loud to someone. Learn what you can only learn by shipping. Do it again. The folder is not protecting you.

Yours,
Enova