"That Will Never Work"

"That Will Never Work" is a great book, i just completed it a couple minutes ago and decided to write this blog... as a way to not only clear my mind but you know… to really convince myself to move on from this project. a common theme this book had was how marc had his eyes set on his goal to solve the core problem of making it easy for people to watch movies. even in the events where he pivoted, the core problem he was solving for still persisted, he just took a different path to reach that destination. i guess this is where the first difference comes in, i did have a desire to make leadflow manager a crm used by every single d2d team in the world but was the idea behind it something i came up with? no. was i the one facing the problem which got me to building this? no. then what motivated me to start this out? money. yeah. that's itmoney. as an international student who was practically broke at the time, i took this project because it made me more than $10k+ and it helped solved so many of my financial problems. i guess my greed is what got to me when i decided to not "sell" this to them but instead i insisted on wanting to expand it to other companies, all because i wanted more money. you know it's funny, time and time again i've seen people get successful at their startup because they had a burning desire to solve a problem. money came in as a bonus. but even after knowing all this, i did the exact opposite chased after money. i won't lie but it takes a lot of self-embarrassment to write something like this, but thats just me. i don't say bs, i say stuff to the face even if its hurtful which most of the times turns out to be the truth. one thing that marc also did was validate his idea quick, he came up with a scrappy "mvp solution" to test out if people even wanted it. again, something i totally ignored to do when i decided to make this a saas. why? money. or at least in this casehopes of BIG money. keep in mind, this is not my first time building a saas. i've already done this once. this was my second attempt. i was so convinced that other companies HAD to have this problem of managing leads that i did not do a market validation at all. yes this product was valid but to who?? the company that wanted a solution! i got blinded by my own aspirations. the last thing i'll mention about the book is that during end of the book marc explained how the pricing or, the new business model was a pivotal point for netflix. for them, monthly subscription was a hit but if you think about it, the main the reason people even bought the subscription was because the value they were getting for the amount they were paying was huge! this goes back to my point i mentioned earlierproduct validation. there was a problem and they made a solution that worked so people jumped on it when they saw the solution being offered at a great price. in the epilogue, he mentions that “You have to learn to love the problem, not the solution. That’s how you stay engaged when things take longer than expected” which instantly invalidates my entire "hustle" of even starting this startup. this wasn't a problem i loved. as a matter of fact, i found it boring as hell. also something to keep in mind is that netflix was founded before the .com boom even happened. things are so-so different now. this book layed a good foundation on what should typically be expected while building a billion-dollar startup. i also overlooked a lot of other points mentioned in the book, one of which is the fact that marc was good at people skills as well, he knew how to manage people and found clever ways to approach a problem. but as i said, things are different now, there are successful startups out in the world right now who marketed their product well before launch. the landscape is different now, earlier having an ecommerce site was a big thing, now its ai. earlier it took months and years to build out an mvp and they had to spend tens of thousands of dollars in marketing and now? $social media is one of the greatest tools out there and especially now that the gen-z has started to join the workforce, we no longer spend time on television or stores. we spend on instagram, tiktok, x. thats something that could be taken advantage of and some companies have already started doing so. product validation is easier as ever and i think if i'm solving a problem i'm genuinely passionate about, i can easilyvalidate an idea, build the mvp and react $50k mrr easily. so, idea → marketing → building → shipping