Tuesday, January 4th 2022
In 2022, I want to experiment with my approach to building and launching tiny internet projects.
My goal is to build more projects, write better blog posts, and increase the rate in which I learn, all whilst ensuring my current projects grow healthily.
Currently, the way I build a project is that I come up with an idea, then spend around 1 month building, 1 month testing, and 1 month launching/writing a post about it, all alongside my regular job.
During that time I'm purely focused on that idea - I don't work on any other new projects. This can mean there's long stretches of time between releasing new things.
For example, with Paper Website there was a stretch of 2 months where I was frantically marketing and waiting for notebooks to arrive. This time was wasted slightly. I was twiddling my thumbs and posting links to Reddit every so often and calling that marketing - it wasn't fun.
However, I've learnt that you do need long stretches of time to market and test an idea. It's a very random process, for 100 days you could be shouting about your project online and nothing happens. Then, 1 day you could have a random break and get featured in a newsletter or something.
There's a bit of luck with marketing, which long stretches of time definitely help, more time than the 1 month I'm allocating when I create and write about a new project.
I want to try out more ideas, and spend more time marketing/growing them. My new approach is to therefore work on a few ideas at the same time.
My theory is that by sowing many tiny seeds and letting them all grow over a longer period of time, more interesting things will happen and I'll be able to try out more ideas in the long run.
By building projects at the same time another project is growing, I'm taking that "random" marketing time and putting it to good use.
This also encourages me to keep my projects tiny. I even admit, that although the core idea of Paper Website was tiny, the final product was not.
I started this blog with the goal of launching a new project each week, and I want to get closer to that timescale again.
This is my plan. I have 3 ideas I want to try out first, I'll share a bit more information about them tomorrow. Let's do this.