💭 Background

Throughout my career, I have experimented a lot. Those were related to startups, products, exercise, meditation; possibly everything that I have done in my life. I would be lying if I say that I did not care about the results. But as I went on; or as some would say, got enough experience, I realized that there are two ways you can carry out any kind of experiment effectively

1. Focus on the journey.
2. Focus on the result.

There is no right or wrong between these two. These are just paths to the same destination, from which you have to select one! I have tried both of these in different spectrum till now.

Let's think of this in the context of travelling from A to B.

In Focus on the journey approach, I will make sure that

• I will try to maximize the experiences throughout the journey. Will spend enough of time in planning the itinerary.
• I will not consider much about the expenses, as the aim is to maximize the happiness quotient of the journey.
• Would not care about the time to reach to the destination.

In Focus on the result

• I will book a flight, and possibly the cheapest one.
• The journey will be comfortable but not as enjoyable as in earlier method.
• The approach would be to reach the destination as fast as possible with least expenses (time and money).

🧐 Product Building Philosophy

I have been building a lot of products (hate calling them side projects) throughout my career. I have built 18 products in the last 10 years, out of which 1 became a real company. That company failed to go from zero to one 💔. It's a decent scorecard in the world of startups.

In the last retrospect (per quarter affair), I realized that there was something wrong with the way I was building products. I was investing too much energy, time, and hope into it! For example, I spent almost 9 months to build Viwr from grounds up; just to realize that the niche set of customers I was focusing on, would not trust on a side project built by one person as a part-time gig. In this case, I went with my gut without any user research.

In another case, I decided to start with paid surveys on twitter. Got 1500 people to vote on it! I thought I have something that considerable set of users need and spent almost 7 months building the most perfect, secure fintech app just to realize that some recently implemented regulations will make this product illegal.

To speak in the language of experiments, I was focusing too much on the journey when the end goal was not clear. And I decided to change that for the next couple of years ✌️.

🥁 12x12

12x12 simply indicates 12 products in 12 months. The story behind this decision is two folds.

1. During my retrospect, I decided to move to Focus on the Goal approach to speed up the iterations of my products.
2. I stumbled upon Pieter Levels' blog! Who did something similar and found success in his 7th product! It was kind of a validation for this approach.

How does it work?

I am going to pick 12 amazing ideas and build them one by one every month. The goal is to build and release one product in a month! It doesn't matter how crappy it is, or MVPish but people should be able to use the core functionality and give some constructive feedback!

As I am a full stack developer, building a product (tech) has always been the easiest task of the product development process. But with this aggressive goal, it even challenges that development process! I have to decide what is quicker vs what is better. Perfection has to be my enemy!

This is going to be an exciting journey! And I wanted to do it with everyone who would love to know what happens 🤗. This page is going to be the log of my side projects and experiences I get throughout this process!

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