The problem with “12 startups in 12 months”
Don't be a donkey
I think Derek Sivers emphasized the importance of concentrated effort best in Tim Ferris' "Tools of Titans" when asked what advice would he give to his 30-year-old self. Derek's advice was "don't be a donkey". By that, he meant the Buridan's ass - a paradox of how a donkey, when placed in equal distance to the water in one hand and hay in another, is paralyzed due to its indecisiveness.
He thinks people far too often are trying to pursue many different directions simultaneously, which makes it difficult to make significant progress in any single one. That the problem is in thinking short term: "If I don't achieve all my goals within weeks or months, they won't happen". He'd say the solution is shifting to a more long-term perspective, do one thing for a few years but do it properly, then do another thing, then another, etc. For me, this perfectly illustrates the "12 startups in 12 months" mindset.
I don't think the diversification to hedge the risks of starting a business is to start another one or 11 for that matter. This only reduces your chances of producing something meaningful in the first place. I believe the hedge to starting a business is building something of quality that you are proud of and can at least add to your portfolio or share publicly if the business doesn't work out.
12/12 philosophy mostly yields hollow projects aimed towards a niche within a niche within a niche market. Sure, you gain experience by launching whatever comes to mind, but you also dilute your voice. I almost get an allergic reaction towards someone in my network sharing yet another super cool "invention", which in reality is just another gadget shipped from another continent that ends up in the trash a few months later or another calendar app that has this one extra feature my Google or Apple calendar doesn't and has a "revolutionary" UIX.
What about instead of spending 12 months in a row throwing gibberish at people to see if anything sticks, one would spend 12 months working on 1 thing. A single project that might make a change. 12 people aren't likely to move a truck on their own, but together they might move a single one - concentrated effort.
The ultimate magic bullet
People have been looking for magic sauces, shortcuts, glam, and glitter for ages. Yet all the greats, be that in business, science or sports attribute their success to the little things accumulated over a long period. Be that learning a skill, getting in shape, or building an audience - it takes time. Greatness is built with one step at a time, day in day out, week by week, month after month, year after year. I think the same applies to business.
Kobe Bryant, an embodiment of perseverance, had a mentality that went something like this - if you reach a point that is challenging, great. It means that it's difficult for others as well. Someone else likely quit at this point. Every step you take from here, you've gone further than your competition. You should embrace the mundane struggle and welcome the hardship because you know that's yet another opportunity for you to gain an advantage.
I feel that the 12/12 challenge is yet another attempt at finding the magic bullet. Sure, something great came out of this challenge before, but the reason behind Levels' success can hardly be attributed to doing this rapid-fire challenge. At the time, this was something new and worked as a great marketing campaign. Today, however, people would be far better off following his advice on being genuine, cutting the bullshit, and not aiming to inflate your overhead with unnecessary outside capital. Aim to help yourself with your solution first and foremost.
All that being said, there is a fine line between being persistent & being stubborn. However, I'd say, on average, a better outcome comes from projects that dance on the line of stubbornness than the ones that are thrown out way too soon to try the next silver bullet.
Build out of passion
Back up. Take it back. Take it way back. What's the goal? Money? Here's a pretty fail-safe plan: learn to program (doable within 6 months on the web) and get a job in tech or do whatever you got to do to earn an income, save until you've got 4-6 month cushion & start investing 30-50% of your monthly income. Do that consistently for 10-15 years and have all the money you need to live happily ever after. If you're after riches, launching 12 startups in 12 months is a terrible investment of your time and energy.
What happened to the good old "solve a problem" philosophy? Does the world really need yet another Instagram filter, an SEO optimization toolkit, or a super alternative AI-powered joke generator? Grow the business organically. Solve a real problem because you truly feel it improves your life or saves you time.
Don't have anything useful? Throw yourself into a new environment, go where the majority is not, travel, take courses in new subjects. Learn & prepare yourself so that by the time the inspiration hits, you'll be ready and equipped to tackle it head-on to build something you're proud to put your name and face behind.
If you truly want a rapid-fire "fail fast", why bother spending the month in the first place. Think about your idea. Think about it critically. Is the solution something that doesn't exist yet? Do people really need it? Could you solve the problem with something else or is it an existing solution in new colors with that one extra feature?
Life happens here and now
I've been involved with bringing something to life for the past 13 months myself aside from working part-time. It's been challenging to say the least as the number of details involved in such a project is immense. I can't imagine speeding through everything in a month for 12 months in a row. That sort of abnormal process requires sacrifices. Here would be the options I can think of:
- Sacrifice the quality of the project;
- Sacrifice sleep;
- Sacrifice time with loved ones;
- Sacrifice time for yourself;
Firstly, I'd say it's difficult to find an "obvious" unsolved problem today so providing a sloppy solution as an alternative to the existing ones is unlikely to gain any traction. Shortcuts have costly consequences down the road even if the idea were to find product-market fit.
Second, what's the point of working nonstop on something if you won't be around to reap the rewards. Sleep is the foundation our health stands upon. No shortcuts here for me.
Thirdly, achievements are always the sweetest when they can be shared. I wouldn't sacrifice relationships & always try to find time for my close friends.
Finally, my 20's & 30's are my physical prime. I'd rather use that to hike up the mountains & swim in the ocean. If that means shipping my next feature 2 weeks later, what's the harm in that? I don't want to put my life on pause. Life happens here & now. I'll have plenty of time to build something when I'm older. I'll probably have better ideas, more experience & a better network to nurture them to life then. What I can't have back is my youth & health.
I am fully aware that pushing something new into existence is difficult, demands sacrifices and more effort than most of us would enjoy. However, I've found that all this can be done organically, making it a part of my life and not crushing everything else with it. This also means that it will take more than a month to build a startup, but as my ultimate goal is to live a happy and fulfilling life, I'm completely fine with it.
In short
I'm NOT advocating inaction. Be bold and make mistakes. I'd just argue that the following principles make for a better chance of success in the long run than the 12/12 philosophy:
- CONCENTRATED EFFORT (don't be a donkey,
multitask-> singletask) - PERSEVERANCE & PATIENCE (the ultimate magic bullet)
- BUILD OUT OF PASSION (shake things up for yourself and be prepared for when the inspiration arrives)
- DON'T FORGET TO LIVE (life happens here & now)
I agree. The one thing I would add is don't build in a vacuum. You need to solve a real problem that you or someone else has.
Absolutely, thank you for bringing it out!
I agree with alot of what you say in this post, and I'd even argue that you are advocating a lot of Pieter Levels' advice on building projects/startups with what you are saying here. But I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding what the 12/12 challenge actually is.
It's not about throwing 12 "gibberish" projects to the world and seeing if they stick. Yes, ,some projects will be sh!t and they would have been best kept away from the public eye.
It's not about building 12 great things in a month each. That's not possible and you are supposed to be focusing on building tiny MVPs to test your problem/solution fit and to find people who would use your thing - product market fit.
It's not about sleepless nights - although many of us still do this :/ . If you focus and are consistent you can get a MVP out in under 100 hours which you could do working Part Time on a project in a single month - coding, promotion, launching, testing. Again this takes focus and consistency, but is doable.
It's not about pursuing different directions simultaneously. Pick a project, pick a lane. Many people have a difficult time coming up with a single idea. 12x12 helps you focus on finding a problem, coming up with a solution, building something to provide that solution, and testing a hypotheses to prove your solution works and is wanted by users. If you have multiple ideas like many of us, prioritize them and focus on them ONE AT A TIME, not simultaneously. Hopefully you find success early and you never need to focus on other ideas.
It's not even about marketing. Yes, Pieter Levels capitalized on and took advantage of this when he changed the title of his blog post from "12 Projects in 12 Months" to "12 STARTUPS in 12 Months". It was a brilliant stroke of marketing and it grabbed the attention of the tech media. BUT this wasn't his initial goal . He just thought it sounded cooler.
Pieter's goal was to train his "launch" muscle and to force himself to test hypotheses of which of his ideas would be worth focusing on.
The trap I think most people fall into is thinking "Build 12 things and i will succeed within a year like Pieter Levels did.". This is a fallacy.
I discussed this in another post here on IH: The main point of a 12x12 challenge is to find and PROVE the single problem you can solve and make money by doing so. It is a numbers game. It might as well be called the "I'm going to keep building a small MVP as often as I humanly can until I find one people like. Then I'm going to double down on my efforts for this thing and charge people for it. If this thing doesn't gain traction, I am going to pivot to a new thing and rinse/repeat until I can quit my day job and support myself." challenge.
There is no way for an individual to know that the first idea they have will be a winner. We sink too much time into a single idea and when we come up for air we realize 3, 6, 12 months or more has passed by and we are still not profitable or still don't have users.
This and the fact that a public 12x12 forces people to maintain consistency, which will also have the side effect of drawing followers and building an audience, is what a successful 12x12 is. Not "build 12 pieces of garbage in hopes 1 sticks".
Again I agree with much of what you say in your post, especially under the "Ultimate Magic Bullet" section, but I think your description of the 12x12 challenge is incorrect.
Thank you for your thoughts!
I do agree that success is a numbers game, the ones who try the most (and follow through) are most likely to succeed also. And I do get that 12/12 often is also intended for training the launching muscle as you so well put it. Inaction is not what I was going after with this.
What I do think is that these sort of challenges advocate quantity over quality. By “following through” I meant turning over all the rocks before giving up & moving on. 100 hours for an MVP. Count in the promotion, launching, testing. How can you fit all that within a month? It inevitably overflows to the next month, which affects the next etc.
In today’s world where cutting through the noise requires a good strategy, but also a lot of luck (unless you’ve got tons of engaged followers from the correct segment), how can you possibly validate an idea within a week or two? What you have at that point are only hypotheses, which must be thoroughly tested. What if you spoke the right language, just to the wrong crowd? What if the right crowd was fed some other content or was not as engaged online on the day of your launch. And with hundreds of launches taking place daily, thousands weekly, it’s statistically incorrect to count low initial traction as a signal to throw your idea in the trash without further, proper hypotheses validation.
Banging your head against the wall is no solution, but more often than not I’ve found not following through when going gets tough to be the bigger problem than giving up early to get to start fresh.
This is a fantastic sentiment and I think it's an important one.
People want to be the Kings and Queens of their own castle, they want the freedom of spending their time where they're interested. A lot of the time in business and startup land, we forget that fact.
The 12 Startups in 12 months is a method to cure people's perfectionism or lack of action - for that, for learning, it's perfect in my opinion. But for longevity or actually creating a successful business (like you mentioned), it's more of a course than the business itself.
Glad to have you agree on this one! I too grew up wanting to become a businessman for the sake of it. After realizing that the entire hustle for freedom & glory is ridiculous if a shift in mindset can make me free & glorious right here, today. This has made me a lot more concious about my time & health and has calmed me down to be able to build whatever it is I am building organically, properly and in harmony with my life here & now.
This needs to be reconsidered, there were days we played games 24 hours on an internet cafe when we were young. These days I can't sit on my chair 2 hours straight. Not to mention if you have a family and kids. Finding a few hours in a weekend is a miracle.
I'd say the solution is to shifting your perspective about 12/12. It's not about building 12 useful or revenue generating products in 12 months. It's about being active in the scene, keep reminding yourself to the audience, using this method solely for marketing purposes.
"Court Attention at all Cost
Everything is judged by its appearance; what is unseen counts for nothing. Never let yourself get lost in the crowd, then, or buried in oblivion. Stand out. Be conspicuous, at all cost. Make yourself a magnet of attention by appearing larger, more colorful, more mysterious, than the bland and timid masses." — The 48 Laws of Power
As you said Levels leveraged it perfectly. He did it when no one thought about it, he basically made marketing worth of thousands of dollars without spending a dime. His first a few products wasn't there to make millions or to cure cancer. He grab the attention, thanks to that attention he was able to fill nomadlist which turned into a job board. While promoting the nomad life style which is again was genius. But that's all.
Still to this day, he never tried something bigger with such an audience who's jumping into whatever he builds. I saw his last attempt was a qr code generator for restaurants. It wasn't build to make millions, it was just to say "hey I'm still here and I have a job board". Whenever he doesn't produce he simply giveaway a macbook on twitter to remind himself. That's the formula of 12/12.
Finally; the difference in between 12/12 and 1/12 is: On the latter you need to keep people interested and excited about a promise for 12 months, well it's hard. On the other hand you'll be able to show how capable, determined you are. If you start something you'll move forward better than anyone else. At least that's the impression.
Thank you for the thorough counters!
I might have over-simplified building stuff when getting older, true. This doesn’t make it impossible though. I believe it is a matter of priorities, and the available time & financial stability to undertake a new business don’t happen overnight. This too belongs in the ”long game” department with tons of small steps leading up to a sitation where one is able to afford leading a startup - time and money wise. Bringing family-time as a sacrifice is certainly not what I’m advocating.
As for gaining attention, I absolutely agree on its necessity. However, considering how dense the modern market is with hundreds of similar solutions to the exact same problems, I strongly doubt launching hollow projects is the way to gain real attention. I can even count over 10 different sites where you can announce your launch and there are probably many more. I believe there are too many voices around today singing the same song and in order to stand out, you need a single dazzling harmony you’ve perfected, not shouting out the same tune as others, multiple times in a row.
Lastly, absolutely. It is exciting to launch something new. Every beginning is interesting as it is likely followed by tremendous initial growth, be that with learning a new skill or gathering a following for a new product. When the growth reaches a plateau, and it does at some point, that’s when the true survivors in the startup world, or any for that matter, will be determined. Most of the feedback on building a community from those who’ve done it say that it takes time. Every single person you inspire with your vision must be fought for as you’re competing for a thousand alternatives to that person’s time & concentration. And I’m not talking about a simple upvote or a like here, if those come by overwhelming effort, then something might need adjusting. I’m talking about building advocates for your vision, the ones that preach what you offer without you being around. This sort of a community can not be built with 12 different “visions”, each within a month.
A philosophy I have is to
be expansive until you have a mission
I think a balanced way to approach 12 startups in 12 months might be...
explore a lot of ideas in tight windows
but if you find something that really feels good - frop the exploration - drop the 12 month goal, and start to hyperfocus on the thing that's working
expand when you're not sure where to go next
contract when you've found a path.
I wrote about exactly this a couple of weeks ago, and most indie hackers -- unsurprisingly -- disagreed with me.
We need to take profit on happiness as early and often as possible, especially when we're still young, healthy, and have our social circle.
Like you, I believe the startup thing will always be there for us.
Well, in my opinion it depends on the key inability of each person. In my case I have been developing for more than a year the same project and I can truly say that more than 11 months were going in circles re-developing and procrastinating launching. For people like me 12 Startups in 12 Months is a way of really setting a deadline and being forced and motivated to launch.
I pretty much disagree with everything in this post.
To use an analogy, who's more likely to find gold: The guy who sticks to one location and keeps digging deeper or a second guy who takes up lots of soil samples first?
This is bad advice imo. Most founders get stuck due to analysis-paralysis. And you definitely can't think your way out of a hole. Doing more thinking will never tell you what the market really wants. You have to put stuff out there and see how the market reacts.
This is why the 12 in 12 challenge is so magical. It forces participants to stop overthinking, just put stuff out there, and get moving.
I didn't understand the part about work-life balance. Seems more relevant to the distinction between entrepreneurship vs. stable job and hence has little to do with 12-startups in 12 months. If you decide to go down the entrepreneurial route, you'll have to sacrifice a few things for a chance at achieving your goals later. (Delayed gratififaction). This is true regardless of if you go all-in on one project or do 12 in 12.
Thank you for your thoughts, Jakob.
I agree with the fact that the one who tries numerous times is more likely to succeed than one who tries once. What I dislike about the challenge is the pace. I get the idea to push you to be more comfortable being uncomfortable by not overthinking making your ideas public. A month, however, is an absurdly small time frame to perform proper "soil samples" as you've put it. I replied with something similar to another comment:
"In today’s world where cutting through the noise requires a good strategy, but also a lot of luck (unless you’ve got tons of engaged followers from the correct segment), how can you possibly validate an idea within a week or two? What you have at that point are only hypotheses, which must be thoroughly tested. What if you spoke the right language, just to the wrong crowd? What if the right crowd was fed some other content or was not as engaged online on the day of your launch. And with hundreds of launches taking place daily, thousands weekly, it’s statistically incorrect to count low initial traction as a signal to throw your idea in the trash without further, proper hypotheses validation."
It's about balance. Yes, you won't get anywhere by not launching, but I think with such a challenge it's easy to fall into the "ah, this isn't working, let's start sth new" mentality without properly testing out all the hypotheses. It's not just about the product or the idea. It's about the audience you target. And how can you be sure you've reached enough people in your target audience to make assessments within such a short period of time.
Sure, launch 12 startups, but take your time with them. Test your hypotheses, analyze the results, learn from them & make adjustments. A successful startup isn't just the idea, it's mostly execution.
As for the work-life balance bit, wouldn't you agree that compressing 12 different launches within a year, especially when bootstrapping them solo, is similar to having a can of energy drink every hour?
Nope. It's all about the scope of the projects you're tackling.
The biggest trap for most technical founders if overengineering. The whole point of doing 12 projects in 12 months is to learn to focus on what really matters: a healthy balance of features users really care about + distribution.
You're not building a fully-fledged startup every month. Instead, you isolate individual value props, build a MVP and then test how the market responds. If no one cares about your idea after two weeks of concentrated market efforts it's a very reasonable thing to move on to the next one.
I sincerely doubt any technical founder is able to "test how the market responds" within a few weeks. Sure, the founder has an initial idea of a problem, a theory of the audience who else has this problem and an MVP solution to that problem. You'd need to validate all 3 before concluding that the idea is not worth pursuing. How can you be sure you aren't onto an actual problem, but target the wrong crowd with the wrong solution for example? Getting all 3 of those aligned takes time and a lot of testing. Counting the likes or upvotes on launch sites or forums provides hardly any indication of failure while actually talking to the potential crowd does. Launching on PH & alternatives can be done within a week, the latter takes weeks, perhaps even months with intermediary pivots.
I get what you're saying about not building something in the dark before validating with the crowd, but this sort of "rapid fire" approach entices early quitting.
What can you do in two months that you can't do in two weeks to validate an idea? In my experience two weeks is plenty of time to test various channels and talk to early users/customers.
If you study successful bootstrapped founders you'll see that almost all of them saw signs of traction very early.
There are of course examples of founders who persisted (and eventually won!) even though no one cared about their projects initially. But these kinds of stories are very rare, especially among bootstrapped founders.
You're absolutely right that it takes time to find the right solution for the right crowd. The difference is how you go about finding product market fit.
Do you build one increasingly complex solution and keep refining your value prop? (digging deeper) Or do you launch multiple minimal solutions to test individual value props as quickly as possible? (taking soil samples)
Another perspective:
You can basically build exactly the same things in both approaches.
In Approach A you work on one project and gradually release new features and refine your landing page etc.
In Approach B you treat each feature as a new project and create a dedicated landing page on a new domain.
The thing is that Approach B gives you a huge storytelling advantage. It's much easier to promote a new project than a new feature. Moreover, you're getting cleaner data on what value prop people really care about.
This is btw also the winning strategy in academia, known as "Salami Slicing". Instead of publishing one huge paper, you release dozens of shorter ones.
Approach A does have its benefits as well with an already existing crowd. I don't think the reality is that objective. In theory you could measure which one of your launches caught most traction within a week let's say. But in practice, how would you know that you actually got exposure to equal amount of people or for that matter, people that the product was intended for? I'd love to hear a digital marketer's perspective on this.
An average technical founder most likely launches on the launch forums because that's manageable within a week/2. Those environments, however, have a very specific crowd. What if the start-up is targeted for housewives or elderly travelers - would you be able to say that an average tech founder could get enough quality data points within a few weeks on that crowd? In your gold and soil analogy, if the soil samples come out rubbish, do you take it as "low traction" and throw out the idea of finding gold in the first place or do you try to take the soil samples from elsewhere to see if maybe you were looking in the wrong place?
I think the summary to this discussion is that the "ultimate truth" is somewhere in the middle, as most of the time :) No situation is the same and we can't arrive at a step-by-step "this is always better than that" solution. There are valid arguments on both sides. I see the value in pushing yourself out the door, not banging your head against the wall and the glam that a fresh new launch provides, but I also see how it can become an excuse for not following through on things properly and sacrificing quality for quantity.
I don’t know anybody who did the 12 in 12 challenge without hitting 10k MRR. The quantity of production leads to improved quality.
Thank you for your thoughts. “The quantity of production leads to improved quality.” - not necessarily I’d say. Sheer quantity without analysis, feedback & the will to improve does not lead to improvement on its own.
It will be interesting to learn what the failure more was if I ever do see an exception!
Hey @sethking, you might enjoy this one :)
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