1/6: Why I'm building a side project
Key Metrics
- One-line pitch: Undecided
- Revenue: $0
- Designer leads: 0
- Startup leads: 0
Public update #1 👋🏽
First of all, welcome! 😊
Early last month, I decided to launch a side-project called DesignBake. More on that to follow.
Last week, I asked people if they wanted to follow along with a new side project that I'm working on, and I was pleasantly surprised by the response. So here we are — I'll be posting weekly updates. I'm anticipating that some weeks I'll get more stuff done than others.
I'll likely keep these updates pretty raw. Nothing fancy, just thoughts on building and launching ideas. Writing also helps me with thinking more clearly, so that's my selfish reason for doing this.
Why I decided to do this
When launching a new idea, one of the first things I need to be really honest about, is why I'm doing this. It's also the first question I usually ask friends or founders that are working on new ideas. It helps to start here because things do get hard and this is a good reminder to tell myself why I decided to start this in the first place.
Here's why I'm starting DesignBake:
- Learning: Bringing a new idea to life things that gives me infinite joy and is my favorite way to learn. Back in university, I got to do this at hackathons or designing random mock projects for fun, but it's been a while since I got to scratch that itch.
- Action > Ideas: I get excited about new ideas often, and have a backlog of 100s of them. I figured that executing on one of them might actually be more fun than just writing ideas.
- Building without expectations: One of the things my personal coach and I often talk about is doing something for the sake of doing it, without setting high expectations. This is a notion I haven't practiced often, so I'm building this without any expectations for myself or others. Regardless of whether the idea works or not, I'll be happy to have done it and learned from it either way.
- Practicing consistency: I want to be more consistent with the things I pick up, so this will keep my accountable in practicing that. :)
- Self-sustaining micro-projects: Lastly, I think that hitting $1k MRR would help validate this small idea enough that I can setup systems to run/automate it. This way, it can run mostly independent of my personal time so that I can build the next mini-project (see point #1).
That's it for now! Next update, I'll share more about the problem & opportunity I chose to solve for.