My Path to Changing the World
My entire life I have had a burning desire to build a product that positively impacts the world. Over the past two years I have been on a quest to learn how to do just that. In order to hold myself accountable and to track my progress I have decided to create a series that documents my journey. As you follow my journey, please feel free to share any advice or wisdom along the way. If nothing else, I hope this series inspires you to chase your greatness.
The Beginning
Over the past 7 years I have built/created a lot of different products and services but nothing has truly made the impact I envisioned. I know you may be wondering what are these products/services so I’ve listed a few below.
- WeSucceedMe — blog focused around people helping people by sharing their own experiences the lessons they’ve learned along the way
- Clutch — black business directory that simplified the process for users to find and support black owned businesses via geolocation
- TG4 Neighbors — neighborhood task service where people can rely on their neighbors to complete daily tasks such as grocery shopping and other miscellaneous errands
My entrepreneurial report card
Reflecting on my previous ventures I realized that I had a lot to learn. After performing a self-assessment on my entrepreneur performance, I noticed a common theme amongst all of my ventures.
- They started
- I invested countless hours into them
- I burnt out
- I cut my losses
This recurring theme really bothered me because I felt like a failure and quitter. It was hard to shake this feeling when looking at my past performance. It wasn’t until I had a revelation, that I realized that I wasn’t being honest with myself.
While I wanted to make a positive impact, my ventures weren’t as successful as I wanted because I was building them for self-gratification. I started a blog because I wanted to start a blog. I built a mobile app because I wanted to check it off my list of things I wanted to accomplish. I started a business because I wanted to be able to call myself a business owner.
Simply put I placed too much emphasis on building products that had a direct correlation to a buzzword or that was centered around my own aspirations rather than solving an actual problem.
So I decided to focus my efforts on creating a product that people needed.
How do you create a product that people need?
This is the question that I set out to find answers for. This is was clearly something my prior engineering experience couldn’t help me with. So I decided to begin my journey on Amazon looking for product management books. Needless to say, there isn’t a lack of product management books available. After doing some research I decided to buy “Start at the End: How to Build Products That Create Change” by Matt Wallaert.
I chose this book because the synopsis spoke exactly to my experience as an entrepreneur and my time as a Software Engineer in Corporate America. I built products that sounded better than what they actually were. Once the proposed value couldn’t be realized, it was on to the next shiny toy that sounded good.
In the next post in this series I will walk through some of my main takeaways from the book. Along with highlighting my takeaways, I will provide examples of how I plan to apply concepts from the book.
