Sell it before you build it

I can build almost anything in a week. That sounds like an advantage and for a long time it was the single biggest thing holding me back.

When building is cheap, every idea looks like it deserves to exist. You think of something on Tuesday, you have it working by Friday, you put it somewhere, fourteen people look at it, and by the following Tuesday you have a new idea. Repeat that for two years and you have a portfolio of small dead things and no business.

So the next ninety days are going almost entirely into distribution, and I am writing this down publicly so it is harder to quietly abandon.

The sequence I had backwards

The one I ran for years:

Idea → three weeks of building → launch → fourteen users → new idea

The one I am running now:

Idea → evidence → conversations → pre-sell → build

The difference is not discipline, it is ordering. Nothing gets built until somebody has described the problem to me in their own words and, ideally, paid for the solution before it exists.

Why service work first

I am deliberately not starting with a SaaS product, which is the opposite of what I want to do.

The reason is that building a product requires knowing which problem is worth solving, and I do not know that yet — not from the inside, not with the specificity that makes a product good instead of plausible. Service work is how you find out. You talk to a business, you watch the actual process, you get paid to fix it, and you learn what it was really worth to them.

Do that seven times and the pattern shows up on its own. Four of the seven will have the same problem. That is the product, and it arrives with customers already attached.

The market hands you the idea. You do not have to guess.

What I am actually measuring

Not followers. Followers are a vanity metric with a plausible story attached.

Every Sunday I look at: content published, customer conversations had, prospects researched, personalised outreach sent, calls booked, email subscribers, leads, proposals out. Ten of something, five of another. The numbers are small on purpose and none of them is "lines of code".

Coding is roughly nine hours a week for now. It is the only part of this I already know how to do, so it is the last place a marginal hour should go.

The actual goal

Ninety days from now the target is not revenue and it is not an audience. It is being able to say honestly: I know who to target, I can name their pain, I can write an offer they respond to, I can take a cold prospect to a conversation, I can run the call, and I can turn what I heard into something worth building.

Plenty of people can build. Plenty can sell. The combination is rarer than either, and it is the only thing here that compounds.