Buildinpublic 0.4 + My "WHY" strategy on which problem to solve.

JJ
4 replies
👋Hi all, hope you are having a productive day today! Week 4 of sharing my #buildinpublic journey. In this update post, I’ll be sharing my Brake-through process of deciding which is THE RIGHT problem to solve and why. I named it “Choosing the resilient problem to solve” But first thing first, let’s start as always with my DONEs for the week: What I’ve done this week: -🍺Beer with some more awesome bloggers, about their blogging journey, and how they handle their relationships with their fans. -Finished designing the WREB Landing page for first-time invitees. update: Last week I shared that I’ll be using Discord cta on my landing rather than an Email form for the invitees, but it turns out that not everyone have a Discord on my list, so I decided to take the Email form approach and to put the Discord Widget inside the WREB app here is how you can do it to your app https://blog.discord.com/add-the..., that way people won't feel they have to do something extra to get in touch with me or to get an invite. А slight detour, to say Thank you to @jesv who was kind enough to take his time to enlighten me on how to properly use my links-bio on Indie Hackers. Check out his profile, he shares very insightful convos on his feed from builders https://twitter.com/JeffSvicarovich Choosing the pivot-resilient problem to solve. In all my previous postings I repeatedly mention [feedbacks] aka, beer talks, surveys, form loops and etc. because it's the most important part of building any kind of business.[ probably ;d ] BTW if you are a text creator/blogger we will be more than happy to hear your thoughts here 💜: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/... With that said in mind creators I speak with face two main problems: 1- cross-posting their content in all mediums 60% 2- not reaching enough audience 40% Obviously, the problem we should tackle is the 60% one right? DONE we will create an ML app that pushes all your content to your predefined linked social profiles! Well, not the case for me. 3 reasons why I didn't want to work on that problem. In the first place if we build something like that with an infrastructure based on ML or even just an algorithm-based, test it out with users, and if it turns out we had to make a pivot, we wouldn't be able to, because we made the very basics infrastructure of our app entirely on hardcore coding ML and etc. [which is not a flexible and intuitive infrastructure to start with at all] so what could happen in the end, if we want to start implementing changes to it we will have to kill the whole project and start from scratch, which will be an insane worth of our time and effort.. In the second place, It's not a problem I personally got excited about, you see, If you really want to build something for people to love you will probably work on it [if it succeeds] for years, to be able to continuously improve your product and to make people happy using it It really should stick to your own personality and you as a Founder must at least got excited about it on the first place if you are not excited about it how are you gonna make people be..? Also if you are not feeling that's the right thing to work on in the beginning, then when it gets hard [which will happen eventually] you will give up very quickly purely because you`ll tell yourself “Nah anyways it wasn't a product I were excited about'' you will let down not only your first users for wasting their time but will definitely disappoint your dev. and your bank account ;d And last but not least, I don't want to create a product with functionalities that people are not already familiar with, [that would be the scenario if I had decided to create a solution to problem 1] It's not ok to educate people with your MVP, just make it simple with flexible infrastructure and similar touchpoints they already used before in other apps, make it easier for them, otherwise you risk to frustrate your users from the beginning which is NOT good at all! Okay, so let’s think through the problems one more time and ask WHY on every assumption I may have about it. It turns out that those 2 problems are interconnected [what a pretty word]. If you look closer and break down the 2 pain points you`ll see that they are similar, and onе does not exist without the other. What I mean by that, let's break it through: -Why do bloggers want to cross-post their craft in all mediums?” :Because they want to promote their craft more broadly. -Why do they want to promote their craft more broadly? Because they want to reach a bigger audience. -Why do bloggers want to reach a bigger audience? :Because they want to connect with like-minded people and create or be part of a community. Let’s summarize: 60% of bloggers I spoke with say they hate to cross-post because it takes too much time and feels like administrative work etc. 40% of bloggers I spoke with say their main pain point is they didn't reach enough audience. I don`t know about you but for me, this is pure psychology-correlation - Bloggers suffer the first problem because they DIDN'T get to the second one 💡 Now this is something that gets me excited to work on. For me that totally makes sense, it turns out that “View Page Popularity” is a way more interesting, pivot resilient, and an important problem worth solving. That’s it guys, I hope my strategy helps you on your way of thinking about how to prioritize your users' problems or how to “why” your assumptions. Because this post got extremely long I'll skip the TO-DO and Pro Tip part for next week's post. Take care, -Gigi ✨

Replies

Emelie Hebert Poulin
Hi Gigi! Great update and thinking. Your problem analysis is very insightful and helpful. Thanks for sharing. :)
JJ
@emelie_hebert_poulin 💥happy to hear you enjoy it 🙅🏼‍♀️🙅🏼‍♀️
Graeme O’Connor
Thanks for the update and best of luck!
JJ
@iamgoconnor Thanks appreciate it 🙅🏼‍♀️🔥