Background
Last Friday was my last day at my corporate management job. In the previous three and a half years I worked two different jobs (for about 20-22 months each) that significantly expanded my professional experience, got my student loans paid off, and allowed me to save up enough money for a 6-12 month runway on living expenses. For the backstory on some of my experiences over the last number of years, have a look at my previous thread, Taking a Ride in the Slow Lane.
Over the past 5 years, I slowly built a corporate training product, conducted target-buyer sales testing and got the product within 2 months of completion as of May of these year.
The product is a professionalized version of a gamified training system I used previously as a freelance corporate trainer. I spent two and a half years developing it to fit the needs of my clients. What I intend to sell is an expanded system with more content, development levels, and a range of flexible options to fit a wider range of trainer/client needs. It provides a naturally engaging alternative to the normally boring training methods used for a common area of professional development training routinely provided by many corporations' HR departments.
I created the product to solve several pain-points I was experiencing as a corporate trainer. During the professionalization process, I also added a number of features designed to solve a short list of additional pain-points that I encountered while managing a large team of corporate trainers at my most recent day job.
Plan
Having concluded my last day at my day job one week ago, my plan is to spend the next six months finishing the product, launching my sales website, and building a marketing engine.
I'll be doing this while living and travelling within southeast Asia. Last weekend, I packed up, sold or gave away everything I owned and left Beijing (where I've lived as an expatriate for nearly a decade). Since my product is a digital product that will be sold & distributed exclusively online, I'm not tied down to a specific location and I am free to work on it from anywhere, so I'll be living and working out of hotel rooms / AirBNBs in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan.
I have a history to doing this in the past and have not had any trouble with travel being a distraction from the work I needed to do. I don't make for a very good tourist. I prefer to be working when I travel, and just work a normal 5 day week and then go out evenings and weekends to socialize. Museums and temples don't interest me.
Goals
I'm comfortable with the idea of job hunting again if I don't achieve a certain level of revenue/profit after six months. Although I am shooting for as much revenue/profit as possible during this six month period, immediate business success is not a goal. I think that it would be unhealthy to create that expectation in my mind at this point, since I have no idea what level of sales is realistic for my product (which is the first of its kind, so there is no good data on what I could reasonable set as revenue/profit goal). Even if the product is ultimately successful, it could very well be a three year project to fully achieve product-market fit.
Rather, I have two primary objectives:
My main reason for taking a period of time off of working a day-job is that it would take me one to two years of working weekends and evenings to achieve the two goals listed above. I'm not willing to wait that long to achieve these goals, so since I was ready for a job change anyway and I have sufficient savings to cover my living expenses for 6-12 months, I've made the decision to spend 6 months achieving the above two goals before re-evaluating and deciding whether it makes the most sense to continue to working on my business full-time or to take another day job and continue developing my business in my free time (which will probably be much easier to do with those two goals already completed).
Additionally, I have a few secondary objectives:
Process & Productivity Strategies
I first intend to spend 5-8 hours per day (five days per week) for the next two months to finish the product and the sales website. For the creative task required for the product development I am doing, I work best with this type of schedule, optimizing for consistent progress, rather than placing pressure on myself to squeeze as much as possible out of individual days. ADHD is an aspect of who I am, so I've learned that I am most effective when I don't beat myself up about not being able to work productive ten-hour days seven days a week even if some people are able to, and instead focus on doing my best work each day until my ability to concentrate is exhausted, regardless of whether it is a one-hour day or a 9-hour marathon.
As I already become competent at doing when working on my product on weekends and evening before quitting my job, each day I'll focus on the most important/logical task to complete that will get the product finished as quickly/efficiently as possible.
Once the product is finished and the sales website is up with a functioning payment processor, my focus will shift to a second phase: marketing and sales. My work at this stage will include the following:
Working on marketing and sales related tasks will be a new experience for me, so I'll have to experiment with how I work best for this type of work.
Althought I definitely believe that my approach to not giving myself pressure to work a subjectively chosen number of hours each day while doing creative tasks has been optimal (and instead allowing when I have creative energy and the ability to focus productively to dictate when and how much I work), I am anticipating that I will need to be open to a different approach when I shift into the Marketing Phase of my six month plan.
The nature of product development when working on a product that requires the development of innovation solutions is that a lot of the productivity is based on solving problems. Working more time often result in solving problems slower, not faster, or in making regrettable mistakes that require a lot of time to go back and fix.
However, most of the tasks I'll need to complete during the Market Phase of my plan will not require problem solving, but instead be about producing a certain amount of items of content. Therefore, I anticipate setting output goals, like a certain number of blog posts each week, completing one product demo video for YT each week, etc. I'll need to experiment to determine what works best for me for achieving the best productivity, but I'm comfortable with the idea of it being a grind that will involve learning to push myself beyond my normal stopping point when doing mentally demanding creative/problem solving tasks.
I anticipate that I will find some of these marketing content creation tasks more demanding. For example, editing product demo videos for YT my be a mentally draining tasks that I can only do so much of each week. Therefore, I'll need to identify which other useful tasks are best to switch to when I've exhausted my ability to focus productively on a more demanding task.
Accountability & Productivity Tracking
To retain some privacy I won't post specific weekly tasks within this thread, as I don't want to give away too many details about my business and product. However, I'll share what I can about my general product development progress each week.
For accountability, once I shift to the Marketing Phase of my plan, I'll post my marketing content creation goals each week on Monday and share a progress update each Friday about how much work I completed and provide some reflection on how realistic my goals for that week were, as well as some commentary on how I might adjust my future goals and the strategies I might experiment with the next week for increased productivity.
Last Friday was my last day at my corporate management job. In the previous three and a half years I worked two different jobs (for about 20-22 months each) that significantly expanded my professional experience, got my student loans paid off, and allowed me to save up enough money for a 6-12 month runway on living expenses. For the backstory on some of my experiences over the last number of years, have a look at my previous thread, Taking a Ride in the Slow Lane.
Over the past 5 years, I slowly built a corporate training product, conducted target-buyer sales testing and got the product within 2 months of completion as of May of these year.
The product is a professionalized version of a gamified training system I used previously as a freelance corporate trainer. I spent two and a half years developing it to fit the needs of my clients. What I intend to sell is an expanded system with more content, development levels, and a range of flexible options to fit a wider range of trainer/client needs. It provides a naturally engaging alternative to the normally boring training methods used for a common area of professional development training routinely provided by many corporations' HR departments.
I created the product to solve several pain-points I was experiencing as a corporate trainer. During the professionalization process, I also added a number of features designed to solve a short list of additional pain-points that I encountered while managing a large team of corporate trainers at my most recent day job.
Plan
Having concluded my last day at my day job one week ago, my plan is to spend the next six months finishing the product, launching my sales website, and building a marketing engine.
I'll be doing this while living and travelling within southeast Asia. Last weekend, I packed up, sold or gave away everything I owned and left Beijing (where I've lived as an expatriate for nearly a decade). Since my product is a digital product that will be sold & distributed exclusively online, I'm not tied down to a specific location and I am free to work on it from anywhere, so I'll be living and working out of hotel rooms / AirBNBs in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan.
I have a history to doing this in the past and have not had any trouble with travel being a distraction from the work I needed to do. I don't make for a very good tourist. I prefer to be working when I travel, and just work a normal 5 day week and then go out evenings and weekends to socialize. Museums and temples don't interest me.
Goals
I'm comfortable with the idea of job hunting again if I don't achieve a certain level of revenue/profit after six months. Although I am shooting for as much revenue/profit as possible during this six month period, immediate business success is not a goal. I think that it would be unhealthy to create that expectation in my mind at this point, since I have no idea what level of sales is realistic for my product (which is the first of its kind, so there is no good data on what I could reasonable set as revenue/profit goal). Even if the product is ultimately successful, it could very well be a three year project to fully achieve product-market fit.
Rather, I have two primary objectives:
- Product Development Phase: finish the MVP and make it available to customers on a sales website (first two months)
- Marketing Phase: experiment with marketing methods and identify at least one that produces more than 1 dollar of profit for each dollar spent on marketing (last four months)
My main reason for taking a period of time off of working a day-job is that it would take me one to two years of working weekends and evenings to achieve the two goals listed above. I'm not willing to wait that long to achieve these goals, so since I was ready for a job change anyway and I have sufficient savings to cover my living expenses for 6-12 months, I've made the decision to spend 6 months achieving the above two goals before re-evaluating and deciding whether it makes the most sense to continue to working on my business full-time or to take another day job and continue developing my business in my free time (which will probably be much easier to do with those two goals already completed).
Additionally, I have a few secondary objectives:
- Gain some customers/users who can be a source of feedback on how to further improve the product to solve pain-points that I am not yet aware of, as well as provide feedback on how effectively I have solved the pain-points that I have already attempted to respond to with the first version of the product
- Become aware of some of some potential options for pivoting down the road if my current product proves to not to be successful enough to building a business around
- Developing marketing and sales skills and experience to further expand my options if I do return to slow lane work for a period of time in the future
Process & Productivity Strategies
I first intend to spend 5-8 hours per day (five days per week) for the next two months to finish the product and the sales website. For the creative task required for the product development I am doing, I work best with this type of schedule, optimizing for consistent progress, rather than placing pressure on myself to squeeze as much as possible out of individual days. ADHD is an aspect of who I am, so I've learned that I am most effective when I don't beat myself up about not being able to work productive ten-hour days seven days a week even if some people are able to, and instead focus on doing my best work each day until my ability to concentrate is exhausted, regardless of whether it is a one-hour day or a 9-hour marathon.
As I already become competent at doing when working on my product on weekends and evening before quitting my job, each day I'll focus on the most important/logical task to complete that will get the product finished as quickly/efficiently as possible.
Once the product is finished and the sales website is up with a functioning payment processor, my focus will shift to a second phase: marketing and sales. My work at this stage will include the following:
- Reaching out to established Youtube content creators in my niche and negotiating profit sharing promotions
- Recording and editing product demonstration videos for my own company Youtube channel
- Writing posts for SEO blogs to drive traffic to my product website
- Reaching out to potential customers who submit their email on my website to collect data and develop a stronger insight on how my marketing approach could be modified to result in more sales
- Experimenting with Google ads/Facebook ads/other paid ads
- Contact businesses with parallel products to propose marketing collaborations
Working on marketing and sales related tasks will be a new experience for me, so I'll have to experiment with how I work best for this type of work.
Althought I definitely believe that my approach to not giving myself pressure to work a subjectively chosen number of hours each day while doing creative tasks has been optimal (and instead allowing when I have creative energy and the ability to focus productively to dictate when and how much I work), I am anticipating that I will need to be open to a different approach when I shift into the Marketing Phase of my six month plan.
The nature of product development when working on a product that requires the development of innovation solutions is that a lot of the productivity is based on solving problems. Working more time often result in solving problems slower, not faster, or in making regrettable mistakes that require a lot of time to go back and fix.
However, most of the tasks I'll need to complete during the Market Phase of my plan will not require problem solving, but instead be about producing a certain amount of items of content. Therefore, I anticipate setting output goals, like a certain number of blog posts each week, completing one product demo video for YT each week, etc. I'll need to experiment to determine what works best for me for achieving the best productivity, but I'm comfortable with the idea of it being a grind that will involve learning to push myself beyond my normal stopping point when doing mentally demanding creative/problem solving tasks.
I anticipate that I will find some of these marketing content creation tasks more demanding. For example, editing product demo videos for YT my be a mentally draining tasks that I can only do so much of each week. Therefore, I'll need to identify which other useful tasks are best to switch to when I've exhausted my ability to focus productively on a more demanding task.
Accountability & Productivity Tracking
To retain some privacy I won't post specific weekly tasks within this thread, as I don't want to give away too many details about my business and product. However, I'll share what I can about my general product development progress each week.
For accountability, once I shift to the Marketing Phase of my plan, I'll post my marketing content creation goals each week on Monday and share a progress update each Friday about how much work I completed and provide some reflection on how realistic my goals for that week were, as well as some commentary on how I might adjust my future goals and the strategies I might experiment with the next week for increased productivity.
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