I was reminded this week that we are already through one quarter of this year in the #wrtalk Twitter group along with the question “how are your business goals coming along”?
Coincidentally I started really focusing on the business just before the start of the year, so the quarter does actually line up and it really made me think about how far I have and haven’t progressed this year (and depressed me a little). I didn’t actually make any concrete goals when I started because I didn’t really have a good idea of where I wanted to take things and to be honest I still don’t.
I’ve got a few projects on the go that are either for my daughter and I to work on and learn together or the start of a potential product or kit to sell, but I’ve been taking a ‘lean startup’ approach to the whole thing and hoping something would fall into place as an obvious direction to take things or at least start down a path, whether it leads to something completely different or sparks other opportunities.
A major problem I’ve found with taking a lean approach with a business that relies on slow unpredictable deliveries is that getting to some sort of minimum viable product in the first place takes a long time, let alone iterating, pivoting or A/B testing. These things are all much easier to do with a purely software product and I’m not sure I really understand how or if they can work if I continue sourcing hardware from China like I have. On the surface it seems obvious to wait for a delivery from China that has ten times the pieces at one tenth the price in order to stock up on things I think I’ll need, but when I’m already only working on the business part time and further splitting my time with other family obligations, how much potential value am I wasting waiting for many small deliveries that all seem to come in the absolute worst order possible?
I’m going to need to figure out a balance between being able to afford to bootstrap a business on a small budget and being able to get things moving at a faster pace so that next quarter I won’t feel depressed thinking that I’ve wasted more time waiting for deliveries.
My goal for next quarter is to have completed a rough prototype of one of the projects that have already been started and be able to decide if it is something worth turning into a product, modifying or changing direction or scrapping completely. I’ll need to figure out if I can hit this goal by waiting for slow deliveries or spending some extra money to get things quicker, hopefully having the goal will be enough to help find that balance.