Another Exposé
Self-doubt has struck again. I’ve spent more than two years building this “thing”. But please don’t tell anybody because it’s a little embarrassing. Why?
- Because you often hear 6 months as the longest amount of time a startup should spend on a project for it to be considered “worthwhile”. I’ve spent more than 2 years. 37signals suggests an even shorter turnaround time of 1-3 months.
- Because I don’t have a network of people lined up to buy.
- Because I haven’t worked out exactly how to find the people that need what I’ve built.
- Because sometimes I wish I’d spent my time working on something more original.
At first I didn’t know what I wanted this product to be. Initially I thought about making a “set of reusable ecommerce components”, but what the hell does that mean? And how would that work, exactly? I don’t know. Eventually I decided I wanted to tackle multi-lingual functionality, and allow products to have an unlimited number of options that affect the product’s price.
Once I came up with a way to enable 100% multi-lingual coverage on the storefront as well as in the administrative area, and a way to support flexible pricing rules, I figured I might as well roll my ideas into a full-fledged shopping cart product. It seemed like a natural thing to do since it was inspired by frustrations with existing shopping carts. But what I probably should have done was find a simpler way to make money from my solutions. Something that didn’t require re-inventing a huge piece of software would have been ideal.
It might be possible to offer standalone components that can be plugged together to build a more feature-complete shopping cart product, but that’s tough work. Or maybe I could somehow package my multi-lingual functionality into something others could use for their websites and web apps. Either one would certainly be more niche, but probably not any more marketable than what I’ve got right now. Some combination of both is what I’m still searching for.