Teamwork might be overrated
How to create products on your own when you have no 'hard' skills
🚨 Hey all, thanks to the 100+ new people who’ve joined this week. This newsletter is sponsored by ProductManager OS. A tool I’ve created to help aspiring and current Product Managers supercharge their careers. In this article, we’ll also dive into how I created this product, how meta!
Like many boys, I had teamwork shoved down my throat at an early age, administered in the form of team sports. Football over running, cricket over tennis, rugby over martial arts. It’s hard to underestimate the impact team sports have on your development. When I was biggest into rugby I’d train 3 times a week for the school team, twice a week for my city and once for the county, Wednesday afternoons were always school games, and Sundays were games for my town. This didn’t even include team gym sessions. With travel, that’s probably close to 30 hours a week dedicated to team sport. My other big hobby was video games, but again, these were always team games, a virtual extension of my physical life. It would always be 5 or so of us, headsets on, working together to blow the enemy away. If you count that as team sport (which I would) then basically all my free time was taken up with this pursuit.
This is the life of a jock. A youth devoted to the development of an ego focused on teamwork. Most of my friends who were also jocks (which is most of my friends) have done well. They hold managerial positions at top companies or slot seamlessly into the fabric of well-paid consultancy positions. They are the gears that society needs to function properly.
The other major group in schools are the nerds. Generally, nerds don’t play team sports, they favour individual pursuits like running, weightlifting, tennis or chess. Nerds, are friendly with other nerds but they are more free-thinking than the jocks, weirder. They don’t spend 30 hours a week working together with other people, they might spend it reading, gaming, tinkering on their hobby or diligently overachieving on their schoolwork. On balance, my nerdy friends haven’t done so well.
Historically nerds have a tougher time of it at school than jocks, because they haven’t been brainwashed to the extent jocks have on societal norms, they can have contrarian views, which, at least in state schools in the UK, is generally not considered a positive thing. Having said this, my girlfriend is a nerd, but she went to a better school than me, her nerdiness flourished with theatre, debate clubs and a curriculum that included philosophy and music.
The Joy of Building Solo
Anyway, this pre-amble is getting a bit out of hand. The only point I’m trying to make here is that if like me, you've been conditioned to value teamwork over everything you are missing out on one of the most satisfying gifts of life - to bring something into the world completely independently.
There’s a reason every single large company was birthed by a nerd, from Apple to Microsoft to Stripe to Amazon, the founders of all them, nerds. Nerds know how to build, they know how to put their heads down and achieve something independently, most jocks can’t do this. They only know how to specialise on a small area of a problem, working with others to solve it. This is important in large companies, it’s a huge barrier if you want to build something of your own. Sure, building a company may eventually require you to work with many people, but nearly without fail the early years are a couple of hackers focused on building over everything else.
Over the last few years I’ve been cultivating my inner nerd, and this week I released a product I delivered completely solo. In this article, I’ll take you through what I did step-by-step. Building something solo, without having to depend on anyone else, really is one of the most satisfying endeavours. There’s a reason most people hate their jobs, you contribute to a tiny piece of the overall pie, you see no impact of your work, it’s just not satisfying. My hope is that after reading this you’ll see that with no ‘hard skills’ you can still bring a product or something into the world, and you’ll love doing it.
So let’s take a look, at how to deliver a product in 1 week, with nothing but your own mind
Step 1 - Ideation
Ok, so you’ve committed to going the distance and creating a product of your own. First step, what should it be?
I think one of the best places to start is to create a product around some specific knowledge you have, this is the basis for nearly every product I’ve ever made outside my main startups.
Do you have a job that many college graduates want like a lawyer at a top firm, or a UX designer? Make a product showing them how you got there, and how they can too. Do you know the local eating spots in your local area? Make a guide for others. These don't need to be world-changing ideas, the purpose of this exercise is satisfaction and to build the habit of shipping products, not to change the world.
In my last project, I took the knowledge I have working for years in Product Management, and put together a toolkit that will help aspiring and current Product Managers progress through their career. I chose this project because:
a) I am just making a system I already use publically available
b) I would have loved to have had this product when starting my own Product Management journey.
Make a list of 10 ideas, and pick the most promising one. Don’t rush this process, you’ll be amazed at how many obvious ideas are hiding in plain sight once you start to see the unique knowledge and skills you have.
Step 2 - Create the MVP
The MVP, or Minimum Viable Product, is the smallest version of the product you can make that will still solve the problem you’ve set out to solve. Most people seem to think software products need engineering skills, this isn’t true.
I created my system using Notion. Notion is a great tool to create software products for others because it’s basically unlimited in the value you can provide, you can create systems, share curated lists, info products, really anything you can imagine. Notion’s AI feature has also unlocked a tonne of value for creators.
But the tool doesn’t matter, your product could be a Google sheet, a video, or a no-code app built on Bubble, what’s important is that it gets across the value you are trying to deliver.
Use AI
For independent, creative work, using AI to support you has really changed the game. It can help you fill in gaps in your knowledge, research, and even create your product.
As an example, for all of my templates, I wanted to include an example, but for obvious reasons, I didn’t want to use real-world examples from my own company. I simply gave ChatGPT the template I wanted it to fill out, and they did the rest
Step 3 - The website
I think that everyone should be able to make a website. The amazing this about website creation now is that, unless you’re building an app, there is absolutely no need to know how to code or hire a developer.
Framer is my go-to choice for website building, you can create really slick-looking sites in no time at all. The below site for ProductManagerOS took me around 2-3 hours. Granted, I have some design skills and experience with these tools but there’s no reason to think an amateur could knock out a decent-looking site in a day
For payment processing I use LemonSqueezy. You can get setup in just a few minutes, and the fees are far less than that of Gumroad, it also integrates in one click to Framer.
Step 4 - Marketing
This is the hard part. When it comes to marketing you have two broad choices, paid or organic.
Organic
Organic marketing is anything that isn’t a paid ad. Theoretically, organic marketing is great, because your cost basis is $0. In reality, it’s not that simple. I’ve ploughed hundreds of hours of work, costs for camera equipment, editing software and more, I’ve been doing it for a couple of years now and have under 3000 subscribers.
I’m not saying this to put you off organic marketing, I’m happy with my YouTube channel because every month it grows, I enjoy it and I’m building up a community of like-minded people, I just want to manage expectations that it’s a lot of work.
There are other channels that are perhaps less work like Twitter, Linkedin or writing blog articles, but even these will likely take you years before you get any kind of distribution.
This is why you’ll often hear people arguing (including me) that you should build an audience before trying to make any cash from organic channels.
Paid
The barrier to entry to paid is much lower. You don’t need an audience or a huge content library to get your product in front of eyeballs if you are using paid marketing. The downside of course if you’ll need to part with some cash.
If you are selling your product for $5 it’s going to be impossible to generate a return through paid ads. If your product is $100+, you might be able to get somewhere.
For ProductManager OS, I’ve been running some Linkedin ads, and seeing decent results. Don’t know how to run ads? Just ask ChatGPT. I’d never ran a LinkedIn ad in my life and am now selling my products through this paid channel at a good margin, purely using advice from ChatGPT. Again, managing this whole thing yourself is part of the beauty of delivering a product solo, you don’t need to, nor should you, hire some paid marketing consultant.
Ad conversions range so much you’ll just need to take a leap of faith. Put $100-$200 behind an ad campaign and see the results for yourself, there really is no other way.
To sum up, we’ve walked you through my personal experience in a team-oriented mindset to embracing individual pursuits, and the joy that comes from creating something entirely on your own. This isn't a slight on team play, it's an invitation to explore the virtues of solo endeavours, something I think we often sideline.
As we moved through the steps of creating your own thing, you’ll have noticed a theme of self-reliance and independence. From ideation to creating the MVP, setting up a website, and diving into marketing, it's all about harnessing the tools at our disposal to realise our vision. Using Notion for creating an MVP, leveraging AI with ChatGPT, and employing user-friendly platforms like Framer and LemonSqueezy – there are a million tools out there to help us create. It’s all in our hands.
What I hope you take away from this is not just a step-by-step guide to creating a product, but an appreciation for the unique satisfaction that comes from independent creation. The blend of jock and nerd, teamwork and individualism, it all contributes to a richer, more fulfilling life.