You don’t have the level not to be focused, mate 🎶
Full-send on vertical networks and other things I learned this year as a bootstrap entrepreneur.
T'as pas l'niveau d'pas être focus, mec
Vald - Technique
One year
That’s about one year since I quit my position in Product at Partoo and started working full-time on personal things. Re-reading Back to Square One — my publication about this then-upcoming new era — feels like reading archives from a distant past.
I forcefully had a new watch at my presentation video to a Discord group we created to support one another with a couple of fellow indie workers. This also felt funny.
One simple thing is clear: I need to focus more.
Listening to Vald’s album repeatedly, these words kept coming in circles: “T’as pas l’niveau d’pas être focus, mec”.
What is less simple, though, is to avoid getting into the same situation in 2023. How do you know you’re losing focus? What are the signs? What is the cost? How to bring that focus back in?
Three is too much
2022 started with two projects: Unbundling Reddit an on-demand service for subreddit analysis. And Stoke Club, a vertical network for surfers.
In short, Unbundling Reddit was super time-consuming. Computing one report would take hours of manual work. I had no intent to automate it since it was the part creating value. I placed the past reports on Gumroad and only accepted a few new requests here and there. On the back burner.
In between, I grew a sharp passion for a voice-centered project: vero.fm. Different people hopped in along the way to help out, and we tried to find signals in short experiments. We were particularly efficient at quickly testing it. Especially not over-delivering for once. Signals were not there for the moment. On the back burner.
And finally, Stoke Club. It was and is taking most of my time. Primarily coding, I admit. We have a couple of good practices with Nico, preventing us from losing sight. But we made critical mistakes. We considered “this big bag of features” a must-have, and we were like, “we need to deliver until we have 100 users”. That mindset was obviously wrong. We knew how to run experiments diligently, yet we missed it.
I am blaming this on my loss of focus.
It did not happen on Unbundling Reddit, nor on vero.fm. So maybe, shared leadership was a reason. I often blindly trusted Nico without questioning, and he probably did the same.
Eventually, we reached 100 users sooner than we wanted to, but in doing so, we lost great opportunities to learn and iterate faster.
Not again
How to acknowledge the same situation next time? Here are the signs I am spotting:
I lose focus when I stop talking to myself in the shower or walking for endless hours at night 😅.
I lose focus when I am not permanently inspired/kept in my thoughts by one thing.
Literally, when I am not a driving danger for anyone else.
That was easy to know that I had lost focus on Stoke Club.
It reminded me of the time at Partoo when I needed to be this “code puker” to keep on our early growth — relying on Thibault’s business sense. At the end of the day, that eroded my passion for the project.
It almost repeated this time. How easy would that be? Code this for five years, and you’ll have another success story. This is not what I want and not what the project needs. Doing so directly impacts my convictions for a project.
Onward
The good thing is that we’re not 2014 this time, and there is Nico. Discussing was key to recognizing the situation. We had rich conversations about how we wanted to build things up in the future. He expressed doubts about the current setting. I recognized that pattern above, and that helped us move on.
I am psyched. For once, I know what I want to focus on. But more importantly, I know better how to address it efficiently.
I want to go full-send on the vertical network meets sports rabbit hole. Namely, experimenting at the intersection between a specific hobby & an inclusive experience. And by “specific hobby,” I mean surfing (alright… maybe skateboarding too).
It took one year. Excited about what this year will bring.
One last word. Bootstrapping makes less room for growing work-related relationships. I felt so fortunate to have met great minds. Charlie, Ryan, Erik, Laura, Théo, Diane, and the Founder Club 🫶: Thank you for your support!
I am passionate about this vertical network thesis and would love to meet new people in the app consumer industry. Please, do reach out!