Log #41: Learning

I broke one of my monitors last weekend, so I have been using a single monitor for the whole week. It was really weird at first, but I eventually got used to it to an extent. If I wasn’t using a tiling window manager, it would have been worse. I still felt like I was losing some productivity, especially for dev stuff, so I ordered a new one and I’m now back to two.

At the start of the week, I met with a friend of mine to do a bit of a customer interview. His role is close to the type of person I’ve been thinking about for the B2B idea I’ve been working on. I learned a ton from the meeting, so I’m super happy about that. He’s not my target customer because of some specifics, but his role is roughly what I’m still looking at - just in a different industry. He gave me the phone number of one of his friends who appears to be in an industry that might work well, so I’ll try setting up a meeting with him to learn more about the problem.

Beyond that, I spent some time learning some technical concepts that I’m unfamiliar with that relates to the idea, and I ordered a book to read through. I also did some research into some regulations that I’ll likely have to handle.

At this stage, I’m confident my idea has legs - there are businesses already in the space making plenty of money with similar products. The keys now are really focusing on who my target customer really is, locking in on the real problem, figuring out how I’m going to market and sell the product, and then seeing whether I can actually build it.

All this research feels like I’m not taking action and making progress on the product itself, but this direction feels much better than building ‘blind’ and assuming I know what target customers want.

I was planning to send emails asking for feedback on the ebook, but decided against it. Black friday is this week and people are getting spammed with enough emails as it is.

What’s next

• More problem exploration.