Watch a business discover and emerge from nothing
This is day zero on building in public. Revealing what it takes to bootstrap, discover and build a business from nothing. I’ve been in deep study and practice for six months. It’s not magic, after all. There isn’t one way to do it, but this is what I learned if you lean to systematic thinking.
I’ll post every few days what I thought before, what I know now, and what I did. From every angle, business strategy, data analytics, design, engineering, finance, growth, marketing, product, you got it.
16 years ago, I started my first job in a large stock brokerage company. I never took a business course in my life. Not even in high school. Yet on this day, I started on the front-line as an investment representative. I became fascinated by the industry and got licensed.
Years went on as I moved into product delivery and product management. I knew our customer’s needs, our business and our platforms inside and out. I chatted with developers, designers, product team members. We thought we knew better what to build than executives. We never understood or saw what business people do. But, maybe like you, we thought it was magic. Something mysterious and full of randomness. Not like science that you practice and train to learn.
Turn back the clock to 2020, I started to wonder. Is it actually magic? It was time to find out.
Good Will Hunting | ‘My Boy’s Wicked Smart’ (HD) - Matt Damon, Ben Affleck | MIRAMAX
You dropped 150 grand on an education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.
Upgrade the library to books, blogs, and courses on the internet, and you’ve got a self-study MBA. Of course, the education and the cost discussion is more nuanced, but I’ll leave that for a later post.
Here’s what I know now. I was wrong.
Ask yourself this question. Would you go build a mobile app, a website, cloud platform after reading a few blogs?
But don’t we do this with business? And design too? It’s a trained skill like any other. You go and learn, train, practice to hit a baseball. Paint a portrait. Engineer an application. And so, you combine art with science to discover and build a business.