How I am going to make my first MILLION dollars from my side hustle starting at $0 — Part 3… -Putting in the work
What I did this week
This week has been very hectic, to say the least. From 100s of messages, networking, and figuring out how my app idea will be brought to life, I have been very busy and productive.
To make sure I don’t burn myself out I have been taking breaks of about 2–3 hours every other day, just to pace myself (I also work a 9–5 job, so it’s very easy to overwork myself).
This week I achieved a lot more than I thought would be possible. I was able to validate my idea by reaching out to many people and gathering their interest, as well as getting a few people with a large following who would be interested in partnering up with me (as in, being partners on my platform).
This is huge news and a huge success. I did all this without even having a product. Or a viable product. Or a minimal viable product. MVP is usually used to validate an idea, and I was able to do this without spending any money on dev costs. All it took was a few hundred emails.
What I plan to do next week
The next step from here is to find funding. I’ve been blessed enough to know a few people who are interested in giving me seed capital if I can sell them my idea (again, through networking and emails).
Given a large amount of interest I’ve already generated, and how simple my application idea is, it should be fairly easy to raise capital to fund the development of the app. It will take a few months for the development of the app. This gives me time to network more, get more partners on board, and also discuss with them as well as the investors what they would like to see, so I can better accommodate my partners and investors as they will be the lifeblood of my application.
What I learned this week
I learned how overloaded, overused, and outdated the term MVP is. People use the term to define a Product, which is Minimal and Viable in the market. For them, this should hopefully generate enough interest/revenue to convince them to keep going forward with the app.
What if the MVP fails and interest is not generated? What if the MVP is just a worse version of the real app? The goal of the MVP is to validate your idea and to do that you don’t necessarily need to spend too much time or money.
Maybe in some scenarios, you may need to, and I actually thought I would need to as well. Nowadays there are a lot of social platforms out there where people with large followings share their email addresses for business inquiries. In my case, I was able to leverage this and send out a few hundred emails to validate my idea.
Thanks for tuning in 👏
I am extremely happy with my progress so far and how things are turning out. As promised, I will keep posting weekly updates about my journey no matter how busy I get, to document everything for my learning, as well as your learning.
