my homie told me drink electrolytes and now my name is static shock and i have super powers
Sup everyone.
We’re building a company from zero and sharing everything. I promised 12 weekly updates in a row.
Last week was Week 1 — where we came up with the idea, built a product, and got users and customers (read here).
We’re working on Tidbit, it’s like ChatGPT, but, multiplayer.
Welcome to Week 2.
We had gotten back from Japan and were severely jet lagged.
We took a train from Chigasaki to Tokyo, then Tokyo to SF direct. The trip was fantastic, and was exactly what we needed.
When we got back to San Francisco — many of our initial days were just kinda spent hallucinating from lack of sleep:
I’m not the type anymore to just pop a Red Bull and power through it.
Maybe that’s a red flag in a founder for some haha. Idk. I did that enough from age 14-24 tbh. I’m still paying back some of those triple all-nighters…
So.
Tidbit.
It was clear after Japan we had something.
The feedback for Tidbit kept coming in from everywhere: little group chats we made with users, DMs coming in daily, long voice notes from users over iMessage.
It got to the point where the things me and Sharif were building next were the exact things people were asking for.
That’s good!
I also just spoke directly to tons of users again this week on a call giving a live demo + seeing what resonated.
A lot of the early week was TONS of little changes users asked for + stuff we wanted as we kept using the product.
(Shoutout Sharif).
But, we didn’t wanna get stuck in 100s of small changes for weeks…
Were we really on to something?
Was Tidbit…”it”?
Who the fk knows.
The way we see Tidbit or any early idea we work on is that the idea does not deserve life. The idea must earn life, slowly. And, it earns life when we get enough pull from the market and/or when we as the creators of it feel excited to keep pushing it forward in new ways from our own internal inspiration.
Every 1-2 weeks, me and Sharif decide if Tidbit lives or dies.
We decided how much to extend it’s lifespan:
+3 days
+7 days
+14 days
+21 days
Last week we gave Tidbit +14 days because of all the positive signal and we had a lot of new ideas for it.
From there, we needed a new deadline.
What would be the next big push?
I love deadlines with clear targets.
The deadline is one simple sentence around what we’re gonna have done/do by a specific date. To figure out what to work on, I like thinking about this question:
“What would we need to build and learn by Day 14 to feel confident that Tidbit deserves more time?”.
When we went to Japan last week it was pretty simple:
By July 3rd have a product we use nearly everyday, and have 10 paying customers for.
If we got that by end of Japan (which we did), we’d keep working on the idea.
We usually wrote goals in an Excalidraw we shared:
To me it’s less about hitting a numeric goal. I actually don’t really care much for numeric user/revenue goals at this stage. It’s more about what we can learn by moving towards a certain numeric goal. For example, if we ended up getting 2 customers vs 10 but learned enough to feeling confident in continuing the idea — that’s a W.
It’s important to me that the goal is a simple sentence and not a laundry list of tasks.
I hate task lists. I hate Trello boards. I hate Notion. I hate docs.
(At least at this stage).
They just look fake productive.
A laundry list of tasks can be fine, but, to me it must be concentrated into a single sentence that me + the entire team can get behind.
(In this case the “team” is me + Sharif).
Team should be able to walk in, look at the sentence, look at the deadline, maybe a few bullet points, and immediately know what tasks we should focus on.
We decided on a simple one:
On July 24th we do a live stream showing people the product and open it up to all.
The above Apple Note is our entire company plan.
Nothing else matters rn.
July 24 or bust.
The goal gets a lot of stuff out of us.
It forces us to productize Tidbit such that anyone can come in, use it, have it actually make sense, set up proper billing, and implement the base list of features we feel a new group of users would enjoy.
It forces us to get a story together around what it is. If we’re streaming in front of hundreds of people, we learn how to describe our product + talk about it.
It forces us to make noise publicly and get out of our heads.
In essence:
This goal forces us to put out something good.
Else, we’re gonna have to put shit out in front of 100s of people which would suck.
I like goals where a bunch of people are waiting on us to deliver, and we must deliver.
So.
Me + Sharif are going to do a live stream on July 24 at 10:30 AM PT.
We’re going to:
show what we’ve been working on
give everyone in the stream access to what we’re building
talk about our process, learnings (we know a lot of you are building your own things, and want to share what’s been going good/bad)
If you wanna watch, sign up here.
Maybe send to a friend or two that would be curious as well.
It would mean a lot <3.
Finally, last week we had the new HQ too.
It’s pretty sick.
Before Japan, me and Sharif agreed that even if we didn’t end up working together and it was terrible — we’d still want a spot to work from because we were just tired of working from our houses.
And, we didn’t wanna kill our souls at a WeWork.
Around June 14 before flying out to Japan we locked down this massive 3,000 SQ FT space in a wonderful location near Polk St. And we got it at a really good price.
A lot of the last week was spent on move-in stuff from setting up internet, to desks, to a basic kitchen. Initially we set up some plastic tables to work from
You may be wondering why two guys need a 3,000 SQ FT HQ.
Well, the idea is that we build something that can grow into the space rather quickly.
I also believe in the idea that the right space can lead you to the right ideas.
The environment where you work is where you’ll spend nearly all your days.
So, why not engineer it to help you produce great work?
Could we build a massive company from the basement of some random dude’s house in Arizona.
Yes.
We can work literally anywhere.
We can build from a hole in the ground.
But…if we engineer the environment a bit to help us out — why wouldn’t we.
(plus cmon pretty places help me come up with pretty ideas).
We got desks today!
Make tidbit support extensions so it becomes an ecosystem when sharing/having AI discourse with friends and colleagues! 🙏🏻
I've been trying to access the website to sign up for the live stream and in general test the tool but it's just in a perpetual load with those two cubes spinning, is this intentional??