Always be shipping

Day 67 / 365

A few days ago I wrote about how I keep having ideas about products, but I either never start building them or just abandon them halfway. The reason almost always is that I am afraid of 2 things

• No one will use it.
• No one will be willing to pay for it.

We always think that anything we build will be insignificant. With so many big companies with 100s of employees shipping products, what difference could a small product made by a single person make?

I used to believe the same, but my perception changed drastically once I started following some Solo founders on Twitter. And now every other day I see one of them ship a new product that they built by themselves, sometimes in just a month or a week. And the best part is, they get sales as well!

Just a few days back, one such product that came out was TypingMind, which was just ChatGPT with a different UI. It used the ChatGPT API, it was a simple static application, with no backend. But it added a few useful features, such as searching through past chats, access to a prompt library, etc.

I would have never thought of building such a product. I wouldn't think that anyone would buy it. But I would have been wrong. The product made 1000s of dollars in sales in just a few days!

But it's not always a success story. Most of these founders also share their failures as well. On their Twitter profiles, you will generally find a pinned tweet where they list down all the products that they have shipped, and usually, 1 out of 20–30 products are actually successful. But the important thing is that they kept building, and kept shipping.