The road so far..

[Andragorn]

Hello all!

Been lurking for about a year and I have yet to introduce myself. Didn’t really know what to say yet.

I’ve been a software developer for over two decades now. From the start, I was dreaming of becoming a game dev. The game industry here was (and is) close to non-existant, and I was never bold enough to go abroad. So instead I became a hobbyist, with a fulltime “normal dev” job. Always doing overly ambitious side projects and completely ignoring the business part of it.

I would’ve most likely kept on going like this indefinitely, had I not stumbled upon MJ’s The Millionaire Fastlane . Obviously Unscripted and The Great Rat-Race Escape quickly followed. It’s hard to describe how my mind shifted during the course of reading these books. It all just clicked and felt right. Financial freedom, something I hadnt even considrered before, suddenly felt within reach. I havent touched gamedev since, and even my interest in gaming has dropped close to zero. I feel like all my time is best spent working towards the goal of entrepreneurship.

This was one year ago. In my mind, the road ahead was more straight-forward than in reality. I started as I always do, aquiring knowledge - reading books and doing various courses on entrepreneurship, marketing and basically filling the gaps while simultaneously exploring whether this was really for me. At some point I started worrying about action-faking too much, started actually doing something.

I began the process of idea generation, which I’ve always found to be quite a bit of a challenge. My life has been monotonous. My domain expertise is almost exclusively about programming and gamedev. The only thing I felt certain about was that I needed to make a SaaS, it certainly fulfills the CENTS commandments. I’ve also made a SaaS from scratch in my day job, so I know I had the chops. I tried to brainstorm various SaaS ideas, and like always the ideas became too broad and too ambitious (probably). I narrowed down my list of ideas and started elaborating on a select few, until I landed on one idea. I started brain storming as much as I could.

To be transparent, the idea I landed on was a website-generator for dog breeders. I remember when buying a dog, finding various breeders to approach was certainly a big pain for me. I wished there was a portal where I could quickly compare them, and feel safe that the breeder was a serious one. So I wanted to make such a portal. Of course, the breeders would have their own subdomain for their kennel name, and they should have various themes to choose from. All professional looking and much better looking and better structured than all those terrible home made wordpress sites or using one.com. It should be supersimple to use and let the users focus on creating content. Even better, lets have AI-assisted content-creation.

- But why stop there! Lets remove all pain related to the process of selling and buying dogs. Lets identify and automate as much as possible, complete with payment integrations and e-signed contracts and whatnot.
- But why stop there! Lets make a companion app for easily taking pictures/videos and providing content updates to customers / interested parties to given litters. Oh and ofc we need a chat function in case they need/want to contact the breeder. But that could get annoying, so maybe have a chatbot in front..
- Oh and the dogs need their own hero pages, complete with pedigree, competition results and all pertinant information the customer would need to evaluate the breeders. Hm, maybe even let each dog have almost like a social media feed, that would probably be interestning for some people. Should probably think of facebook and instagram integrations for sharing content cross-platform..
- But why stop there! As we have payment integration and such, we could also have a module for dog hotels. There’s certainly money to be had there, right?
- But why stop there! What about dog sitters, dog walkers, blogging, articles, dog show calenders, dog training, etc etc etc.

Certainly as I add more features, this site will become THE goto-place for all your doggo-needs, right? This is gonna be huge man.

I knew I was scope-creeping as usual, but I couldn't stop myself. The feature list grew parallel to my excitement. The possibilities was endless. I had to validate this idea! I bought the domain and webhosting and started building a landing page. Trying to copywrite text for it, I soon realized I didn’t really know what I was selling yet. I had a billion cool potential features but focusing on a select few proved difficult. Back to the drawing board.. What was the most logical thing to start with? I concluded that I would need a fair amount of breeders before it makes sense to add the other features. So lets focus on that.. Back to the landing page and copywriting. Copywriting was challenging and ChatGPT wasnt really helpful. Probably because I still struggled to nail down exactly what the product actually was. What was the painpoint I was addressing? Well, making websites is hard.. But if they dont already have one, do they actually want one? Why are there no competitors in this space? Seems like most people use facebook and cheap online marketplaces and that’s “good enough”. Selling pups is a lot of work, though not super lucrative. And the market for pups is shrinking after everyone got pups during Corona..

The doubts started creeping in. My goto when this happens is to acquire more information. More books, more courses, more research and inevitably more beating myself up about action-faking. But I needed answers.

Simultaneously I was also actually developing the SaaS, exploring frameworks to use, setting up infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines and the whole shebang. Probably because it gave me a sense of progression, though I had been thoroughly warned that entepreneurs dont invest time in such endeavours before absolutely necessary. Fail fast. I jotted this effort down in the action-faking column, yet I still managed to rationalize it somehow.

Meanwhile, at work I was approached about getting more responsibilities, such as product-ownership. I figured that this was a good opportunity to learn more about things relevant for my own venture, and that I could focus on that for a while until I got a handle on it, and then come back to this entrepreneurship stuff. Things have been crazy at work since, but I still spend every free second thinking about entepreneurship, and when things settle down (soon), I will definitely give it a serious go.

From what I’ve gathered, I should make a niche product and focus on B2B. But I havent the slightest idea niche to choose, and I cant for the life of me think of a niche where I know of any pains. I could pick a niche at random, learn about the domain and try to address any pain points I could find, but it seems a bit risky.
Or I could pick a domain I want to learn more about, such as marketing and make a SaaS around marketing automation tooling for a certain niche, maybe for indie gamedevs..
Or I could find a SaaS that seems appropriate in scale for a solopreneur and apply a value skew. That would probably allow me to learn more about the domain as I validate value skews and ultimately create a solution.
Whatever I do I need to validate and fail fast, which is challenging for me. I'm used to being thorough, and my personality needs a certain level of confidence before I can conclude anything. I suppose I just need to practice.

As I’m typing, I realize how it all sounds and start imagining replies. I already feel an urge to get defensive, which would probably be counter-productive. I'm sharing as unfiltered as I can, because I’m here to share and learn - and I hope even harsh truths can lead to epiphanies.

Best regards,
Andragorn

 

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