You’re Not as Interesting to the Internet as You Think You Are!
And here is how you can leverage that for your business and side projects.
“The Internet never forgets!” — that’s what I kept telling myself when my thumb was hovering over the “send” button. But, unless you are Kim Kardashian or Donald Trump, there is another side to that: it also does not care. Like — at all!
To me, this was so far the most valuable lesson from starting the online builder, maker and productivity community “One Project per Month Club” (1PPM).
But in a world that seems to be kept spinning by attention and popularity, how can it possibly be a good thing not to be noticed?
Scaling Problems
The first benefit concerns your scaling problems. Because you don’t have them!
Before starting 1PPM, I had this irrational fear that once my email address was visible on a public webpage, my mailbox could possibly explode with requests. Handling these potential requests manually would not scale, so the scaling problem had to be solved first, right? Wrong!
As long as we are talking about an audience of a few hundred people, and by that I don’t mean visitors of a website, but the tiny fraction of them that is actually interested in your page/product, you will be happy about every contact or feedback mail you receive.
In the first days of 1ppm, a trending post on HackerNews brought about 10.000 visitors to the 1ppm project page on GitHub. 6.000 of them visited one of the related blog articles. I could even motivate some visitors to go through the initially ridiculously complicated “signup” process and enter their names and projects in the 1ppm hall of fame. However, I received almost zero feedback. Not on twitter, via e-mail or in comments, although I had been asking for it.
Pieter Levels (levels.io) describes a similar trend in his article “What happens when you’re #1 on Hacker News for a day”. According to the article, a whole day at the top position on HackerNews led to 25,000+ page views, lots of links and new Twitter followers. However, he received only 30+ emails, so nothing one can’t handle.
If you nevertheless want to be on the safe side, you could still use a mailing list provider like Mailchimp. They offer a free subscription form and have a free plan for up to 2.000 users. Even if your idea is great, it will still take a while to make the 2.000 right people give you their e-mail addresses.
No need to be perfect
The next thing I learned is that putting an idea on the Internet without using a major platform is like shouting it out the window. The chances that someone who is actually interested hears it, are very small.
Therefore, perfectionism is misplaced. There is no need to worry about possible rendering problems on internet explorer 6 or having sleepless nights because you might have overlooked a typo.
Your product and vision should be solid. The sign up or contact process should work flawlessly and there should be no obvious bugs. But there is still time for changes and experiments. It will take a while to get a lot of people to visit your site regularly.
So get a first iteration out quickly. The worst thing you could release is still nothing at all.
A dog chasing cars
Going public with a minimalist product like this is probably how a dog chasing cars must feel like. What is he supposed to do if, one day, he really catches one?
But has there ever been seen a dog catching up on a car? In reality, that does not happen. A good example for this point is the case of calm.com. Calm.com is a “mindfulness mediation” website and app. At the moment I am writing this, this app has over a million downloads in Googles Play Store and tons of paying customers.
When I first came across this idea, I thought: “Wow. That does not seem complicated at all! It’s basically an audio player and some specialized content. A small team of app developers and a meditation instructor could do that in no time!”
But then I realized what made calm.com stand out: the fact that, at some point in time, I had heard about it.
When I checked the app store, I found dozens of other meditation and mindfulness apps. They all have from zero up to a few hundred downloads each. But I never heard about those before. If I wanted to try an app like this, I would probably go with the one with a million downloads first. This is called the Matthew effect:
For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. — Matthew 13:12
This does not mean that a new idea or different approach is not worth pursuing. It just means that it will take a lot of time, effort and experiments.
I did some research and learned that calm.com was founded by Alex Tew, the “million dollar homepage” guy, and co-founder Michael Acton Smith. They had raised 415K in angel funding and lured investors in with the vision of becoming “the Netflix for personal development”.
Compared to any of the other meditation apps, calm.com has tons of marketing budget, a professional team, experienced investors and was covered by all the relevant media and blogs. If your app has all of this, your product will be measured by different standards and you probably need to take a different approach.
However, before calm.com came out, there was a free website called “do nothing for two minutes”. It displays a relaxing picture, sea sounds and a 2 minute countdown.
One can hardly get more minimalist than that. Nevertheless, the site soon had two million hits from stressed out office workers taking a break (see “The Hyperactive Weirdos Of Silicon Valley Are Going Crazy For This Site That Calms Them Down”). That showed Alex that there was a demand for similar online products and helped him to find partners and investors.
Conclusion
So unless you are already famous or cooperating with some big names, start building your idea fearlessly right now and get it out in the world as soon as possible. If your idea sucks, you will find it out soon and you can move on to the next project. If there is interest, keep going, experiment, listen to the customer feedback and see where this might get you.
Whether you are interested in testing ideas , want to build an impressive portfolio or just want to get some items off your todo list and into the world, you might be interested in joining the “One Project per Month” club. Get things done, with a little help from your friends :)
