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My startup's current progress, with twists, turns, and a new $5k investment.
Last week I was excited to tell you about the Personalized Learning Feed I was building. I made great progress in a short amount of time!
If you can put up with me on X, I post constantly throughout the day of the sheer joy of coding with AI. Its a magical experience and, I expect, going to fundamentally change the way we approach product development and startup building.
I had a working prototype in only a short days. Then, as startups journeys go, I started to rethink where my energy was focused.
There were a few thoughts running through my brain I couldn’t quite shake.
#1: “How fast can you get to revenue?”
I met with a friend many weeks back who asked me a pointed question about how fast I could get to revenue with my startup.
I told him, as I’ve written in this newsletter, that I wasn’t as focused on how fast of a business I could build, but more trying to scratch my own itch. I laid out a plan for building for me, an alpha users list, a closed beta, and finally with a closed beta as a step function to be sure I was over fit to my own needs.
I liked my plan, but I couldn’t shake the feedback for some reason. I’d literally wake up in the middle of the night in an imagined argument with this friend about why I didn’t need to focus on revenue.
It was curious to me that this single question was causing so much consternation, and, upon reflecting, something I felt I should listen to more than I initially had.
#2: Can we actually build the learning feed?
I was able to spin up the UI fairly quickly for the personalized learning feed but we were quickly finding the scope had expanded significantly on us.
Its like the ease of building caused our constraints on scope entirely disappear! I was imagining (and coding) as many features as I could on the front end app. But the actual magic of our app, how we take what a learner is trying to learn and organize it into an understanding of their mastery and then guide them in learning more, was becoming more complex than we were sure we could handle.
As we started to scope back the “mastery engine” more and more, the essence of the app started to seem more difficult to obtain. We weren’t confident this would be an app we would want to use, which was violating our litmus test.
We started brainstorming simpler approaches where we could sell something to a customer without needing to build the entirety of the mastery engine. How could we pare back the scope?
#3: Case Study Focused Startup Building
I’ve followed Rob Snyder on SubStack for the last few months. He’s written many fantastic pieces about finding PMF that have really resonated with me. His approach, which I’d characterize as “Lean Startup is b******”, made so much sense to me.
One of Rob’s approaches is to discard pain point validation approaches and just focus your startup’s goal on generating one “hell yes” case study. If you can do that, then focus on repeating it. Then again, then again.
Viewed in this lens, a startup’s aim is to build a repeatable process of “hell yes” case studies. To do this, focus, focus, focus. Trying to boil the ocean, as I was seemingly trying to do with my app, was potentially biting off far more than I can chew, and, not putting me in the best position to succeed.
Where do I go from here?
A few weeks ago I wrote about micro courses and my vision on how they could displace online courses.
Shortly after, I met with a friend who runs a courseware company and discussed the idea with him. He wasn’t sold on micro courses, but he did put me on the path that his company has specific needs they weren’t sure how to address.
They had two significant needs from their customers:
Help students better prepare for certification exams
Help instructors create better, dynamic quizzes
We kicked around a way we could help him out and started a soft engagement plan. He set me up with one of his courses and we put it on the backlog to see if we could take his course content and turn it into something useful with AI.
Now tying this all together, I may be sitting on a very focused potential case study. What if I could help my friend’s courseware company solve their problems with an AI assisted learning experience? Could this be a better path by starting with one case study for a courseware company, then finding another courseware company, then another? The technical challenges remain but the path to immediate revenue was much clearer.
So this is what we’re pursuing. We’re focused 100% efforts on seeing if we can solve this one company’s problem. If we are successful at that, we’ll make some revenue and have a case study.
And, to top all these thoughts off, I enrolled in Rob Snyder’s $5k PMF Camp to put more rigor around my processes. I’m starting today with a couple hours per week investing in an accountability group to help me in my quest to find PMF.
More learning to come!
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#HappyLearning