Since I gave up my full-time role in August last year, I’ve had a lot of quality time to pause, reflect and just enjoy life. I stopped working on a startup, took a break from working full-time, spent lots of time with family & friends, and daydreamed about what I’d like to do next.

Entering 2023, I feel recharged and excited about the possibilities ahead.

This week, I thought I’d write about how I’m going about ‘idea exploration’ and deciding what to do next. I’ve read a lot of posts from founders but not many have focused on the ‘-1 to 0’ stage — which refers to finding an idea that you want to work on. I loved reading Gagan Biyani’s (co-founder of Udemy, Sprig and Maven) Part 1 blog post on this, but haven’t gotten to see Part 2.

This visual by WaitButWhy accurately sums up what it feels like in the idea exploration phase.

In the process of exploration, I’ve noted several opportunities that I could pursue as ‘my next thing’. They all feel like perfectly valid paths – each with its own set of learnings ahead.

I know that once I pick something up, I’m going to give it my 110% to bring it to life over the next few years — so I’d rather spend a little more time picking a path & building conviction on it vs. trying to rush the process and chasing the first opportunity that comes up.

Here are 4 ideas & paths on my mind at the moment:

1. Launch a new startup

This is what feels most familiar and exciting to me. I would likely bootstrap it to initial revenue — aka not raising venture money to validate and grow it to first revenue. Once it hits initial revenue, if the customer demand, growth opportunity, or product landscape calls for it, then I would consider raising some money to accelerate growth.

I’m still exploring problem spaces right now and I have 2-3 main ideas I can dive into: one is in the productivity space, the second is legal tech, and the third is a tool for indie marketers.

Potential first steps: Validating the idea by talking to as many potential users/customers, helping them solve the problem with manual solutions, and making the first revenue.

2. Scale DesignBake Recruiting

As I highlighted in my last post – DesignBake Recruiting feels like a high-growth opportunity to scale as a service business. I’ve validated the service with 3 customers over the past ~6 months, and it’s a high-ticket service that can make $5-10K/month/customer.

I don’t enjoy the recruiting part enough to make it a full-time thing, but I love the marketing & sales aspect to get the service in front of more customers. So, I’ve actively started to look out for a recruiting partner to scale this business with — someone who can run the service while I focus on bringing in customers.

I’m looking for someone who:

1. Knows or is willing to learn recruiting from 0-1 — I can teach everything I’ve learned about it so far.

2. Has an incredibly detailed eye for process — managing email campaigns for thousands of candidates at once

3. Enjoys writing & collaborating with people

4. No experience required — I’d rather find someone who is ambitious, willing to learn, and a process geek.

With the right partner, I can see a path to scale this to a $1M/yr service or productized service business. If you or someone you know is interested, I’d love to chat :)

3. Build niche, indie products

I hang out on Twitter a lot. There’s a whole sub-community of ‘indie makers & founders’ — designers and engineers who find very specific niche problems, solve them with small software products, and sell them into that niche.

Some examples of products like this are:

• LogSnag

• Typefully

• StageTimer

• Feather.so

All these products make anywhere between $1K to $20K+ per month (guesstimate) and represent a compounding asset that is building value, revenue, and equity along the way. These indie founders also consistently share their learnings on Twitter, which in turn attracts an audience and becomes a marketing channel for their product.

This is a path that speaks to my love for crafting good software and solving problems with technology. They often look like silly little ideas at the start, but as you explore the market and demand for them, there’s a chance that it’s a much bigger opportunity than initially anticipated.

I’ve started learning how to code and know that if I spent 3-6 months full-time learning and writing code, I could find a way to start building and launching small software products.

4. Create content around design (newsletter, podcast, YouTube, etc)

I love writing. I enjoy helping new/current designers grow. I enjoy helping startups with design. At the intersection of these three interests, there is an opportunity for me to focus on creating content around early-stage design and startups.

Taking inspiration from Lenny’s playbook — it could look like building an audience via a newsletter, podcast, or social channel(s) and then building a community or product to add value to this audience. Through his audience, Lenny also invests in startups given his reach & audience — which is something I’d like to do as well.

The difference in this direction is that it emphasizes content over software. It’s something that I haven’t tried full-time before, but writing publicly more has helped me get a glimpse into what this could look like.

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Wrapping up, these are the 4 possible paths I’ve reflected on so far. Each of them is exciting in its own way and I know that there’s no right or wrong answer here. What are your thoughts on these?

I feel fortunate to be in a spot where I can make this choice. The -1 to 0 phase feels like a mix of adventure, curiosity, learning, uncertainty, and risk — all of which feel like growth to me.

That’s all for today, and I hope reading this has been valuable for you as well.

(PS: Even though I sent it out to just ~19 subscribers last week, it seemed to have reached many more people. Another 6 people became subscribers, which is always exciting to see. Thank you for the support! 😊)

Stats from last week’s newsletter