Thursday, September 27, 2012

Yay! I'm In 30x500!


Yes, I'm one of the 75 students in the winter 2012 30x500 course.


What Is 30x500?

30x500 is a four-month "product creation" course by Amy Hoy, the creator of Freckle and Charm. "Product creation", because you don't exit the course with a ready made product.

Instead, you're going to learn (in addition to other things):

  • how to have only profitable ideas
  • how to secure customers for your product before you ever commit a line of code, or write a single page
  • how to build a product by yourself, without making yourself miserable
  • how to find your customers
  • how to get your customers to come to you
  • how to write sales copy so your customers will listen — with no previous copywriting experience
  • how to launch your product to immediate sales


This course has propelled several success stories, including Bootstrapping Design and Planscope, actually, Planscope twice.


Why I Chose 30x500?

For 13 years I was a designer and developer in a large multinational company. I worked in research and development. That means we made brand new products. Most of those projects failed in a way or another.

At least two times in my career we worked for over two years to create a product that was discontinued almost immediately when it came out. I loved both of those products but they just didn't sell well enough.

Looking back, I can't name any telltale sign of a product that's going to fail. The failing products are not always bad products... And there are some awful products that just thrive.

The only common nominator to all failing products is that they don't sell well enough. I think this course offers an unique viewpoint to that program - getting the customers first.

I want to create my own SaaS-application. And I want to be successful. I don't want to bury another product.


8 comments:

  1. Congrats! Look forward to reading about your progress.

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    1. Thanks Pierre!

      The course starts in November, so you'll have to wait a bit.

      But I'm home now and I'll start posting regularly again.

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  2. Hey Jaana. I've started to look into developing products as well. Didn't know about this program before I started :-) Looking forward to seeing your results and review. Best of luck!

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  3. Hey Mat! Thanks.

    If you are building a software product, then I recommend this book:Running Lean. It also tries to tackle this risk of building something that does not sell.

    Best of luck to your new product!

    The course lasts 4 months, but I'll be happy to review it when I'm done :)

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  4. Thanks Jaana! I'll definitely check out the book. Do you have a page that has all a list of all your recommendations/reviews? I think it might be beneficial to your visitors and could help with affiliate sales at the same time.

    Best of luck with building your SaaS application. Any clue on which market it would be in?

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    1. Thanks for the tip! I recently also got asked what is SBI, so I think there is an order for that type of page.

      I have several ideas of possible markets, but I'll need to get a bit further to study/fix it. I'd love to have a customer base with like-minded people who are relatively easy to deal with. But maybe that's just a dream. I hope not.

      With SBI, I ended up into a market that I thought I'd never want to take. But its also something that has been "calling me". And now I'm writing an ebook on related subject that might change people's lifes. Life is strange.

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  5. That would be great if you could find stress free customers like that. If you figure out how to do that, let me know :-)

    "Life is strange" is definitely a quote I often repeat to myself now. 5 years ago I never would have thought I would be creating my own businesses, working on things I care about, and helping people. Now it's all I think about. Let's see how strange life will be 5 years from now :-)

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    1. Yesh, one cannot but love this! I look towards the future with enthusiasm too.

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