I was inspired to quit my corporate job, and focus on my own projects.
One person who greatly inspired me is Pieter Levels.
Pieter Levels is a Dutch entrepreneur and developer known for his work in the startup and digital nomad community. He gained prominence for his project called “Nomad List,” a platform that provides information and resources for digital nomads, such as cost of living indexes, internet speed data, and community forums. However, I followed him on Twitter (now X) because of his 12 startups in 12 months back in 2014, which you can read in his blog here. The problems Pieter identified in entrepreneurship is completing a project, and launching it to the world (no matter how small it is). And these are the problems that I myself faced two years into my entrepreneurship journey. I started a project, paid money to set it up, and then half way I decided I didn’t like it and abandoned it, and this has attributed to my negative profits after my first year of business.
We like the feeling of starting something “new”, we despise the feeling of finishing something “old”.
Pieter Levels
Pieter attributes not completing and not launching as the key reason why many startups didn’t progress. And I’m truly having this problem too.
Hence, I’m going to challenge myself to 2 startups per month, by completing 1 startup per week, and then resting for another week. And I’m going to draw the definition of a startup I am creating from Pieter’s blog:
A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
From Pieter Levels in I’m Launching 12 Startups in 12 Months, where he attributed it to Eric Ries in Startup Lessons Learned
Update on 11 April 2024: This is Day 4 of the challenge of my first startup, and I realize I can’t finish everything in 1 week. Hence, instead of 1 week per startup, then 1 week of rest, I’m using up the entire 2 weeks for 1 startup.
Going further, I have key criteria for my startup products:
- maximum upfront cost of US$25
- allow me freedom of time and location
I also need not start from scratch. I can “revive” my old projects as well, that has yet seen light.
Why do I want to do twice as much as Pieter Levels?
According to Pieter, only 4 out of the 70+ projects that he had worked on made money and grew. His hit rate was 5%. Based on this statistics, I need to try about 20 times to hit one winning project. 20 is not a multiple of 12, and will be hard for me to track if it not a complete week or month. Hence, I’ll look at 2 projects a month.
I’ll be updating this blog here on my challenge. Stay tuned.