Build small things first

This was one of my biggest mistakes on becoming a creator. Started big. Too big.

I’ve lived with dedica.co for more than a decade. Mostly as a dream. The project only went live 2 years ago. The goal was to build a combination of Amazon and Goodreads for niche sports. A place to understand which equipement to buy, where to buy and more importantly aggregate all the available information around product. Think reviews, youtube videos, people using it, articles, etc.

I thought I needed to know a lot about programming to build something good. There are many moving parts e-commerce, CMS (Content management system), social features. I set my own trap.

Some thoughts on where I went wrong.

1. the problem was not defined clearly. If someone asked me what was Dedica I’d spent at least 5 minutes trying to explain the problem, the dynamics and how dedica solved it. Even if the tagline was always the same, depending on the audience the explanation was different.

2. The idea is big. Too complex. Wasn’t able to isolate and see if something could live on its own. Tackle on thing to begin with. The solution in my head was all the features are important. The combination of ideas is what makes this valuable. So I chased a custom built complex app. Everything from scratch.

3. Focus on building exclusively. Very little or non-existent marketing, sales, design, user and customer experience, social media presence. It was a software project not a business.

4. As an inexperienced developer I chased what’s new and cool. Bounced around so much. A lot of wasted time.

Good thing is that I’ve went through that already. I’ve learned a lot. A business project can’t be created in isolation. By only putting attention on one thing.

“Think big, start small” makes a lot more sense to me today. It could also be “start small, stay small” or “start small, grow enough”.