If you’re starting a project in 2018, this checklist might come in handy.
Like millions across the world and with three days left to NYE, I took some time to reflect and analyze our accomplishments and failures from this year. I thought they might also come useful to anyone working on a digital project, or to anyone who wants to do so in 2018.
I believe these learnings apply to projects of all kinds of complexity, from simple websites to apps that take months to develop. Building a startup? A Shopify store? Your cryptocurrency consultancy website? Any consultancy website? Any website? It’d have been great to have this list handy and avoid many mistakes, so maybe they’ll help you with your project in 2018.
1- Focus is key, learn to say NO.
“You can do anything, but not everything”
I don’t know who to attribute this quote to, but I think it summarizes the first key learning. Your time is limited and you need 100% of it to reach your goal, you’ll reach it more slowly if you invest it in something else. You’ll also face many problems associated with your lack of attention to your end goal.
It’s very easy to be distracted by opportunities. We were taught to say “YES” to opportunities, and then go figure out how to make them happen. Most likely it will require resources you’ll need to take out from that thing you once called focus. I personally learned this lesson after I had to play catch up with pending work, answering emails days later, and not paying attention to details I should’ve paid.
I think saying “NO” is one of the skills you’ll need to learn, not only for side projects, but also for many opportunities that will present to you. Say “NO” to that meeting request if you won’t be able to add value to the other person or viceversa. Cryptocurrency investing? Sounds great, but investing is not the same as trading every day.
In any case, if you say “NO”, be polite! Never underestimate anyone, it’s just lack of time to say “YES” to everything.
2- Short term projects are not profitable in the short term.
While learning to say “NO” is key, it’s also challenging to choose wisely when to say “YES”. That’s when you’ll figure it out somehow if you don’t know how to do it.
Side projects and short term projects enable you to try new things, and they can also help strategically with your current focus. We invest a lot in side projects, as long as they are part of our long term strategy.
We also determine beforehand how it is that we’ll measure success, as it could be measured in many different ways. It could be the acquisition of a new skill set, discovering a need, or just having a good time building something cool. However, if you’re measuring success in terms of profitability, understand that short term projects (started from scratch) won’t necessarily be profitable in the short term.
The internet is full of opportunities, but none of them is a get-rich-quick one. They will all require research, development, improvement, and time. There’s a reason why search engines rank better those older website and apps that were frequently updated. We learned this after building many “short term” projects, from apps to ecommerce stores. Only those that we invested time to optimize and improve were the ones who turned out to be profitable, like when we added the iMessage app to the Nerve app and went viral.
We are #2! 🎉_Two months ago, we wrote this post:_blog.beta.uy
Some opportunities will truly be one-in-a-lifetime, but some others will be seasonal and will happen once every year, so that all it takes to succeed is to add a little bit of innovation and value on top of the trend each time. Be it in ecommerce, app development, content pages, or any online project, there’s bound to be a seasonal trend you can take advantage of.
As an example, you’ll start seeing ads for healthy and diet related products in January, just in time for your NY resolution’s diet. On February, gifts for valentine’s day will start to pop up, and then summer is right around the corner. There’ll be many trends you’ll be able to use to capitalize on every month, until Christmas, where millions will buy their ugly sweater.
3- Go all-in, but validate.
Being focused in one long term goal doesn’t mean you need to risk all resources from the start. Many times we were too naive to build products that weren’t as appealing as we thought they would be, underestimating the validation phase completely.
Validation requires feedback and input from potential users, and the only way to achieve that is by creating a community of followers interested in what you build. I think Ryan Hoover couldn’t explain it better in this post:
Building a startup? Build an audience, first._A few days ago I received an email from someone asking for advice on how to find a technical co-founder for his startup…_medium.com
Product Hunt is the best tool to embrace during the initial phase of your project. I wrote this on a previous post:
The Product Hunt team and community helped us a lot throughout our journey. From brutally honest feedback to advice and support.
I believe Product Hunt is the number one resource a maker should use as part of the process for building anything, regardless of whether the target audience is the Product Hunt community or not, it will help you gain visibility and feedback.
If you’re in the app development world, there’s an important tool recently announced you should embrace: Apple pre-orders.
Apple's App Store now lets you pre-order iOS apps and games before they launch_Apple has quietly allowed developers to make their apps available for pre-order. It's a basic feature - as Android…_techcrunch.com
But don’t worry about the tools too much, I believe Nikita’s advice is worth listening, after all, he did a couple of things right :)
4- Design for growth.
I wrote an article this year on the importance of designing for growth:
What most don’t see in TBH, an app sold for ~$100M and launched only 9 weeks ago_Top 3 insights on TBH for product makers hustling to build an overnight success_hackernoon.com
In case you weren’t able to read it, here’s the key takeaway:
If you were good enough to build something truly valuable for some users, they’ll want to share it. However, viral growth won’t happen if you don’t encourage it, providing ridiculously easy mechanisms to do it.
Designing for growth is much more than just implementing growth hacks, it’s about deeply integrating the experience of getting the word out into the product. It’s a mindset that product designers need to incorporate.
5- Come up with your marketing strategy before anything else.
If you know your marketing strategy upfront, you’ll design the experience tailored to the audience, acquisition channel and campaigns you’ll do. A lot of people underestimate the importance of integrating the marketing strategy with the product.
As an example, if you’re going to use social media influencers, make sure there’s a use case for them to showcase themselves. If your main acquisition channel will be through ASO, make sure you can rank high for the main keyword, designing a clear brand and name.
I wrote a post with key learnings on marketing strategies for App Makers a couple of months ago, but these insights don’t really have to be limited to apps:
How we succeeded on the App Store and acquired 4,000,000 users_A little over a year ago, we founded Beta Labs with the goal of creating engaging mobile apps, tailored to young…_hackernoon.com
6- Growth is the result of a great product, not the precursor.
One of the points on the pocket guide of essential advice from Y Combinator was this one. You can read it here:
YC's Essential Startup Advice_A lot of the advice we give startups is tactical; meant to be helpful on a day to day or week to week basis. But some…_blog.ycombinator.com
I wish the guide was published before. We acquired millions of users exploiting trends that made our apps go viral, but we lost most of them over time. You can have a high converting and attractive marketing strategy, but if your product doesn’t add value, you’ll burn every penny spent on growth efforts.
The capacity to gain an accurate and deep understanding of users is what will differentiate working smart from working hard to build something useless.
That’s exactly the reason why there’s no such thing as an overnight success. If you want to build something useful, there’s no shortcut for feedback loops.
7- Team is everything.
Assembling a team with the right people is the hardest task of building anything. I can’t be more thankful for the hard work, commitment and talent everyone in the team put in every project we’ve been involved. We’re a team with a very different set of skills, but we all share the same values. That’s why I truly believe in this quote:
“Do not tolerate brilliant jerks. The cost to teamwork is too high.” — Reed Hastings, CEO Netflix
When you’re in your twenties, it’s not only about the money. It’s about the opportunity cost of investing your time working on something else. It’s not the time to settle down. It’s the time to experience and learn something new every day while having a good time. You’ll be able to achieve this if you’re working with a team of talented people sharing the same values.
The team of people you work with is not limited to the one inside the company. No company is built in a vacuum, so you’ll need to team up and partner with other talented people and companies.
In any case, avoid working with people who don’t share your personal values or the same commitment to the project, regardless of how brilliant that person might be.
8- Communicate with transparency.
After working on many different projects, we learned that one of the key reasons why some didn’t work out well was due to lack of clear communication. Both internally and externally.
Communication helps set expectations. Lack of communication changes them, distancing what’s expected from what’s received. This applies to a client expecting a different product, an investor expecting better results, or a teammate waiting for a task to be finished. I think you got the point.
Paying detailed attention to communication is also important to tell the truth in a better way. In the startup world, there are many bad news to be said. Telling the truth is key to maintaining trust among the team.
Andreessen Horowitz wrote a post on the importance of telling the truth. Here’s an abstract:
If you lead an organization, being dishonest can be fatal, because the quality of the organization’s execution is a function of the quality of its communication and the key to communication is trust.
The truth about telling the truth is that it does not come easy for anyone. It’s not natural or organic. The natural thing to do is tell people what they want to hear. That’s what makes everybody feel good . . . at least for the moment. Telling the truth, on the other hand, is hard work and requires skill.
Here’s the full post:
How to Tell the Truth_"Got crack all in my drawers, I'm just honest." - Future, Are you an honest person? I'll bet that you answered "yes.…_a16z.com
9- Share your progress.
This was one of our key learnings this year. It helped us connect with people we never thought we’d connect with. We started the Beta Labs blog in January, and since then we’ve been sharing key learnings and insights.
We applied each of these top nine learnings into our last project of 2017: Top Nine. You can learn more about it here!
Top Nine is going viral!_Announcing the Web version_blog.beta.uy
Our posts have been read by thousands, and we couldn’t be more thankful for the support we’ve had from every follower and reader, but there’s one special mention we need to make: David Smooke and the Hackernoon team.
Hackernoon was the first publication that chose to give us a voice, exposing us to their audience. If you put hard work and effort into writing your stories, I’d recommend you publish them here. Few other publications put as much work curating the content while also remaining able to publish articles quickly.
With 3 days left to NYE, the only thing left to say is to wish you a happy new year! This year, push yourself and jumpstart that project you’ve been thinking about. Let me know if I or anyone at Beta Labs can help. We’ll be happy to hear from you at [email protected].
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