I am excited to share my journey of Buildspace N&W S2 (Nights and Weekend Season 2). This is a 6 weeks program to build in public and gtfol (get the f**k off localhost). Every week, there will be 1 workshop, 1 talk and 1 weekly update.
The first week, there are around 900+ persons joining the kickoff workshop. The host and founder of Buildspace, Farza is really frankly telling us to our faces that according to his experience, there will be only 20% of us make it to the end 😂.
Hopefully you will see me post 6 articles about N&W 🤞.
Week 1: Ideating
First week is all about brainstorming and doing The Mom Test. In case you don’t know what a Mom Test is, it is telling your idea to your mom and she should be able to understand it easily. Without any technical jargon or logic behind the scene, just make people understand what your product is about.
I was really struggling with finding the right words to explain my idea. So this is my initial idea posted in public:
We are given the tasks to view other classmates’ ideas and give them feedback. I am lucky to receive constructive useful feedbacks as follow:
- Without the examples in the post description, they have difficulty to understand what SoundBetter is actually doing.
- Instead of telling what SoundBetter can help them prevent from, make the subtitle tell what SoundBetter can provide them in a positive way
So.. I changed my idea to be:
Hopefully this is clearer than the original post. Seems like I really need SoundBetter to help me find the right terms to explain the idea 😆.
What makes me feel surprised?
- Networking
I initially set my goal for joining this program as knowing more like-minded people. After joining the events, we realized that we only able to chat in temporary channel during the workshop.
Farza gave us good explanation about networking isn’t the focus now. We should work on the project and gtfol instead.
Don’t get me wrong, we still get to know some friends by giving feedback or commenting to their LinkedIn or Twitter posts.
2. Solo development
As YC school always recommended us to find a co-founder before starting (https://www.ycombinator.com/library/8h-how-to-find-the-right-co-founder), I was worried about having no teammate to build together.
Turns out it is totally fine!
3. Build in public
I was struggling to compose the LinkedIn posts at the beginning as I feel so awkward to share about my idea before there is a usable product.
After few posts, I found myself getting familiar to post and talk to some people who are giving feedback. I couldn’t wait to share my beta version once I made the product with minimum quantum of utility while I am not required to post it.
Enough to writing, I should go back and build SoundBetter now! Keep going! Cheers 👋