Increasing Velocity

A project built in a few days got more traffic than my first 4 side projects combined.

A few months ago, I decided to launch Notion Tools, a curated list of Notion third party apps, tools & resources. I built it in a few evenings after work, and quickly shipped it to Product Hunt.

I checked the project's traffic, and realized it had steady growth with close to 2000 monthly visitors. All of this while I didn't spend more than 2h per month on it since the launch.

Even if these numbers are not crazy, they're still more encouraging than the ones from my other projects, especially since I didn't spend more than one week on Notion Tools.

With that small amount of traffic, I could do some affiliation, start a newsletter, make a course, or do other cool things to monetize it.

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This project taught me a very important thing:

It doesn't matter how much time you spend building your product, what matters is if people want it and it solves their problem.

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Aside from jobs and freelancing, I spent the last few years building projects online, ranging from trying to sell Apple Watch Straps, starting a clothing brand with some friends, an iPhone case brand with other friends, and other projects.

But most of them failed for one reason or another, and were not profitable.

But I don't consider them as complete failures, I still learned from them.

The hindsight you get from launching a few projects is great.

You get to understand why you failed, what you did wrong, what could've been improved.

But let's be real. Knowing all that doesn't get you closer to building a successful startup, product, course or brand.

It's painful to fail.

It's frustrating.

You could stop now, like many others.

But trying again and reusing what you learned usually increases your odds of succeeding.

So trying a few more times might be worth the effort.

And that’s why I’m going to increase my shipping velocity.

To do so and validate products or ideas quickly, I'll try to tighten the gap between having an Idea and getting meaningful feedback from target customers.

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I think I was too scared of this kind of feedback, and yet it's the most effective.

With an MVP, selling directly through cold emails, DMs or a quick launch is a way easier way of validating your idea. You'll know if it's really worth investing more time and energy into, and you won't spend months (or years!) on a pointless product.

Not validating my other previous projects led them to not really stick, which made them hard to market, and made me waste too much time and energy.

And I don't want to make this mistake again.

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If you want to follow my journey, you can follow me on Twitter, YouTube and my Newsletter where I'll start posting updates and documenting my journey.