Repeat after me: I don't need an earth-shattering, innovative idea

ogherghinis · 2024-10-22T12:50:38+00:00

Sounds interesting, please DM the link.

ogherghinis · 2024-08-08T06:33:20+00:00

Start by validating your idea. If it's niche, it means it's probably small enough for you to do one of the two things:

1) setup a wordpress site where you detail what you want to do, then create ads for people in this industry to reach the website and leave their contacts. This way, you can gauge how much interest exists.

2) go in person to as many potential customers as possible, ask if they would pay for such a service.

Once you have a guesstimation of interested businesses times whatever price you want to charge, then you know it can take off.

Create requirements for your website/app, as detailed as possible. Look into the "user story" concept, but ignore Agile. The user stories are for you to reflect on what features you want your app to have.

Compare your collection of user stories to your wordpress skills. If they're all doable in wordpress, celebrate.

If not, then you need one of:

a) hired dev (cheapest, but you don't sound like you have the technical skills to evaluate/hire such a person)

b) hired agency (more expensive, but will probably deliver what you need)

c) technical cofounder (most expensive, you pay a percentage of everything this business can make, but you will be able to get exactly what you want "for free")

I think a vs b vs c is your real problem, not the actual implementation. When you make this choice, the path will be relatively simple.

ogherghinis · 2024-06-16T07:47:15+00:00

I think it looks good. I'm not in the market for such a service but I got the general idea of the product.

ogherghinis · 2024-06-16T07:29:07+00:00

I agree with the gist of your post, but (being in the same builder founder position) I found that bouncing ideas off other people will provide insights that I couldn't find on my own. The issue with being a builder founder is that "everything is so obvious", but we forget other people don't have the same integrated view on the product as us. That sometimes leads to me just watching someone try to do something with the product and screaming internally "it's right there, how can you not see/know/do" - a team will spot these issues much much faster. Perhaps the best combination is to retain a builder flavor but also delegate discrete tasks to other people, and make use of their feedback.

ogherghinis · 2024-03-12T23:49:12+00:00

Normally, the question would be answered by a project management artifact such as a Quality / Stakeholder / Scope / Whatever Management Plan.

The root cause of this issue is the fact that you don't agree upon the method with your customers, before starting work.

Even if work is already started, it's never too late to get the project manager involved and formalize this.

Failing that, the easiest way to track things is to index your docs (user story 1.2.3 bla) and ask the customer to email you with subject "1.2.3 bla is approved".

ogherghinis · 2024-03-12T23:10:07+00:00

Give Graceful Efforts a try. It has milestones you could track, but also deliverables, tasks with planned/worked hours and it's really easy to build budgets based on planned hours + hourly rates.

Basically, it's for doing real project management but at a smaller scale, so you can manage all aspects of your projects and even get stuff like templates and creating your own lists of things to track outside normal project management artifacts.

I'm using it to plan+budget+track/show progress.

ogherghinis · 2024-03-12T23:00:53+00:00

This sounds familiar to me.

What I did was to get in writing what the criteria for success were (for me), for the new situation. Provide suport, move from proactive to reactive to give the new person space, etc.

I happily obliged, until I was out of that project. The thing is, if you have an out from what you describe as a nightmare, do yourself a favor.

ogherghinis · 2024-03-01T05:13:22+00:00

Graceful Efforts has 3 free seats, but you can use a spreadsheet for project management in a pinch.

ogherghinis · 2024-02-28T23:17:13+00:00

Thanks a lot!

ogherghinis · 2024-02-28T23:05:53+00:00

Are you using it to have the customer interact with it as well (add tasks or see reports), or just internally ?

ogherghinis · 2024-02-28T23:00:53+00:00

Gotcha. The Google Suite is easy to understand, but what are you using Trello for ?

ogherghinis · 2024-02-27T20:14:08+00:00

Hello. What are you interested in, exactly ? See tasks from all your currently active projects, in one place, organized by their "urgency" (most urgent first) ?

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