12 Products in 12 Months Doesn't Always Work
Why It Can Be Good
First, let's talk about why it can be good, there are a lot of things it can do for you. Launching X startups in X months is a tremendous task but it can help you build your brand.
Doing such a feat will attract the attention of other people making in public and can accelerate the process of building an audience. Building a community is one of the best things an indie maker can do because it builds a group of people that support you and can give you feedback. Organic marketing and word of mouth are a godsend when you don't have thousands to spend on marketing.
With each project, you introduce yourself to a new audience which again helps with building a community.
You also get a lot of practice launching and this can help you avoid common pitfalls when you build something big that really matters. You'll immediately have a lot of the boilerplate stuff down to a science (what analytics service to use, how to format social media posts, etc.)
What To Watch Out For
I think it works best if the ideas are "smaller".
If your ideas are "meh" or are just side projects then this could be a great option. You can pump them out quickly and give them a fair chance without spending months on them.
You can't do a project a month if it's big and requires lots of work. Just build them out and even if all of them flop, you'll still have built a great community and audience as long as you #buildinpublic and keep the community involved.
If you have an idea that you think has amazing potential and would require work, I would suggest focusing on it. If you try to do multiple projects, you won't be able to give it the attention it deserves. Go the usual validate -> mvp -> beta -> launch route.
In Conclusion
Those are just my thoughts, feel free to comment what you think.
You can connect with me over on Twitter: @selvarajashish
Focus is a very valuable asset, I would recommend trying not to waste it.
I've tried the 12x12 Challenge in the past and sadly ended up burned out and tired without a successful business.
Yes I learned a ton, but, I would've rather spend those 12 months iterating over one single problem/market than building random ideas.
Something like 12 startups in 12 months but around the same problem/market is a much better option IMHO.
I think Jon Yongfook hit a similar path while doing his 12x12 challenge and he course correct in the middle of it and ended up building Bannerbear (his current successful business).
The thing is, when you have focus, you will still learn a ton, but also those learnings will compound between them, because apart from learning: to launch, marketing, sales, product development, etc. You'll be learning about the problem, and the user. So you will start approaching things differently and smarter if you keep iterating.
I agree. However, I also think that it's a good way of testing out a bunch of ideas. Sometimes when you spend a year developing something only for it to flop. But, I suppose good validation could prevent that.
For me building a business is not about testing random ideas, is about trying to solve a problem that people are willing to pay to have them solved.
You should do that as fast as you can, I'm not advocating for spending a year building a product, what I'm trying to explain is that 12x12 will distract you a lot if you pick different things each month and also that 1 month is not enough to know if your idea will work or not, so I'd recommend doing 12 startups around the same problem in 12 months. That way you will learn and test things fast, but always around a common topic/problem/market. That way the chances of success are much higher in my opinion.
I think the 12 in 12 months is a great story of course, so it will definitely help you to get noticed. But the main take away from building multiple products is that you get better at it!
For me personally I noticed that one month is a bit too short of a timeframe for me to really understand a problem space and come up with a solution for it that could actually help solve the problem. We started out with trying to go from idea to revenue in 10 weeks and that worked quite well. You can definitely get there faster with the amount of tools that are available but we're now actually slowing down a bit to get better results.
So we currently aim for about 4 new startups that we actually launch in one year, that gives us room to kill ideas in an early stage and enough focus to help support the ones that we feel are good enough to actually help solve a problem.
I like the 10 weeks/project timeline.
I tried to do a 4, one-week projects - a branding version of 12 projects in 12 months - in December and quickly realized that was not enough time.
Now ~4-6 weeks is the shortest I'll do now for branding, website, marketing strategy.
But, I'm dipping my toe into building actual products (vs client work) and I was looking for a realistic timespan to hold myself to. Thanks Paul!
That sounds like a good approach - the middle path.
Allows you to have "harder" ideas and give them time to prove themselves.
It doesn't necessarily mean that we only pursue 4 ideas per year, but we do limit the amount we ship to around 4 and kill off or shelve the ones that we don't see enough potential for in the early stages. So in that sense you are more invested in the ones that you pick to really go for.
Makes a lot of sense 💯
I think you are missing the point of 12x12.
First, if this is your first attempt at building something you probably should not be starting with a grandiose idea. Start with all the small ones you have to build up your 'launching' muscle. Also, if you DO start with one single grand idea, the chances of it succeeding are severely limited because it is your only shot.
The idea of 12x12 is to take as many chances as possible so you increase your likelihood of success - 1 in 12 (or more) attempts are better than 1 in 1 attempt.
Also, you can still do 12x12 with grand ideas, you just need to whittle those big ideas into the smallest MVP to get it to market to see if you get traction with it.
That's really the point of 12x12: no matter the size of the idea, get out the smallest piece of it that show the public what it is and let's them decide if they want it. If you gain traction from one of these 12x12 ideas, you have some basis to decide if you want to move your focus to it instead of a new project.
If one of your projects gains traction, you have an indicator that it COULD be successful and can make an educated judgement on whether to focus on it.
The alternative is what you state in the last part of your post: go all in on a larger longer project. While many of us do this, we are simply blindly hoping that this is THE idea without any ground for knowing this. It's like buying a single lottery ticket and hoping it pays out.
Pieter Levels (@levelsio) explains this very well in most of his talks (check them out on youtube if you haven't). Also @csallen has a great MicroConf talk about this but he uses the analogy of "digging for gold in El Dorado". It's really a great talk for budding solo founders/makers.
At the end of the day, the "12 startups in 12 months" is really just an a catchy blog post title that really means "Build as many small things (ie MVP) as possible until you find one that gains traction and might be profitable, then focus on that one until you prove it is or is not profitable. Even if you have large ideas, distill these projects down to their most basic value proposition, build a simple thing around it to gain visitors. Rinse and repeat. Fail fast. Fail often.".
Again checkout @levelsio and @csallen talks on youtube for a better explanation.
EDIT: all this being said, I still have a large backlog of projects I wished I'd been building instead of focusing for far too long on my "lottery ticket" project (Eurotripr.com) without finishing it yet :(
Hi Craig,
I get that.
What I felt was that if you have a "bigger" idea, one month is definitely not enough time to get even a small MVP that has the spirit of the big idea.
Even if you distill it down to its core, you most likely won't be able to do it justice in less than a month.
Especially because a lot of ideas require you to learn new technologies (at least for me). So, your development time is often not just building the mvp.
Will check out those talks.
Ashish
12 startups in 12 months is all about virality. It was a hit on the internet once. But nowadays almost everyone is doing it. So nobody cares about it.
The best thing to do is come up with a new idea to go viral and attract many eyeballs to your project.
I don't think it is about virality. I think @levelsio was "lucky" enough to get some traction with his NomadList project (and really GoF*ckingDoIt before that which gave him an audience/visibility). But he went 'viral' because he hit upon a need in the market that barely even existed yet: Nomads wanting to go to cheap places and not being able to find details to compare said places.
But it took @levelsio something like 60-70 attempts to "go viral" and he's had a lot of failures. The thing that was different with Pieter, and the real meaning of the 12x12 challenge, is not that something goes viral, it is that he tried A LOT of things until one or two gained traction, then he doubled down efforts on those. So what seems like 'viral success' was really a large number of attempts at success and just playing a numbers game. @levelio (and anyone who really wants to give 12x12 a shot of success) went into his challenge and projects knowing they'd all probably be failures, but if he scratched his own itch (or that of his friends) and very quickly put a crap but useful MVP out to the market he could see if it had legs and if it did focus energy on growing it or if it did not focus on something new.
That's the key: quickly understanding if what you are working on has traction and is wanted by the market or not, not "virality". And knowing that "12x12" really might mean "100x100" by the time you find a successful project.
Also, it's why "build in public" is such a good idea, but many people don't understand why. A lot of people think (and I'm guilty of this) "if you build it, they will come." or "if I build it in public they will care." But realistically nobody does. The reason building in public is such a good idea is that you build a small following that is vested in seeing you succeed. This isn't going to happen on your first project in month 1, but with a 12x12, you can tell your story over a year and gather followers each month with each new project build journey and they will be rooting for you to succeed when you launch your things. Each month you have new followers (even a few) that can spread the word about your thing. It's exponential, but not viral. And it requires consistency, which many of us (myself included for a long time) lack. And it's why many fail or get burnt from 12x12 and Build In Public: they/we don't maintain consistency.
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but with a 12x12, you can tell your story over a year and gather followers each month with each new project build journey and they will be rooting for you to succeed when you launch your things. Each month you have new followers (even a few) that can spread the word about your thing
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Agreed.
The one thing I would love to know from this is how they approach marketing when building a startup in under a month. As in my perception, I feel marketing does need patience & time of its own.
Agreed! Great advice. The x startups in x months never appealed to me.
I have my SEO agency and also my SaaS katlinks.io
I also have a couple of small side projects, but I can't even imagine doing more than that. Just not enough time in the day, and I feel like I wouldn't be able to focus.
12 product in 12 month it remind me of the book: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.
Have a read
This comment was deleted a year ago.
Pieter Levels (@levelsio) and John Yongfook (may have spelled Jong's name wrong) are two that immediately come to mind.
Edit: spelled Jon's name correctly (i think)
What were the businesses built by Jon Youngfook before Bannerbear?
here's a blog post about what he worked on: https://blog.yongfook.com/12-startups-in-12-months.html
He might have other posts about them, but I was able to quickly google this for you.
That's awesome. Thanks bud :)