My plan to make next world changing business for the freelance economy
My overarching goal is to dramatically improve 1 billion people’s quality of life by 2052. So I’m defining “world changing” as one that really improves a lot of people’s lives. And since I’m a product designer, the way I plan to go about achieving that is largely through building products. Here’s my plan:
1. Building businesses with impact as the main goal
When creating a system (because I’m creating a system of building businesses), it’s an important, yet obvious, thing to consider that the system moves towards accomplishing the goal it was intended to achieve.
For example, if your goal is to make as much money as possible, you make decisions in your business based on what will make the most money.
Pretty obvious!
A plan to make the next billion or trillion dollar business might very well look different from this plan to become world changing. There are different variables you have to consider, and this necessarily changes how the elements in the system work together.
All this to say that I prioritize dramatically impacting people’s lives. So every action I take is filtered through the lens of, “does this maximize impact?”
When you improve people’s lives, there’s no shortage of opportunity to make money creating that outcome. So in my mind, when impact is king, profit will be queen.
All that to say: I think you’re more likely to make a world changing businesses when you focus on giving the most value as possible, not trying to make as much money as possible.
2. Find patterns
When you’re in a niche, you get exposed to a level of intuition and pattern matching that doesn’t occur if you hop from industry to industry. This means you can develop insights that others aren’t aware of, and leverage those insights to create products others haven’t thought of.
Publishing those insights is going to help me position myself as an expert in the field. And being an expert means more opportunities to collaborate with larger names in the industry, increasing my reach, therefore increasing the potential for impacting lives.
3. Solve big problems that haven’t been solved, or find hidden opportunities
I think that there are at least two ways to build something that can potentially dramatically impact lots of people’s lives. The first obvious one is by simply solving problems that already exist.
The second one comes from being in a field long enough to pick up on patterns. This also relates to the pattern matching I mentioned in the last step. Picking up on this helps guide your intuition, and you can hypothesize that there might be an implicit need the market wants but doesn’t know yet.
I want to make products that are novel by nature, and speculating on possible businesses is a good way to do that. Most will probably be a flop, but I’d rather try than not.
4. Grow an audience
Solving these problems or finding these new opportunities will help to grow an audience that I can build for. The more people that are interested in using the products I build, the easier it will become to rapidly test ideas.
The additional benefit to having an audience that I’m creating value for is that I can bootstrap everything. No need to raise funding because I’ve already got a group of people who will validate the idea by paying or invalidate it by not.
And this is why the focus is on building solutions to big problems, or finding new opportunities. It’s about building products that people can’t ignore.
5. Shorten the feedback loop to build a business
I would like to pair down the entire process to 30 days. Meaning day 1 is idea, and day 30 is an MVP that has thousands of users ready to try it out. This is why having an audience is going to be really beneficial. I can build a crappy version in a day and have at least a few hundred using it the next day to see what needs tweaking.
By day 30 I’d like to have enough information to either pivot the idea, scale it, or trash it.
6. Creating a new business a month
At this point, with a big enough audience and a tech stack that will help me pump out products, this could potentially mean 12 new businesses a year. What’s the point of trying to make so many though?
It turns out that Rovio had developed over 60 other games before arriving at Angry Birds. Do you remember the other ones? No. And this is typically how the world works. It takes a lot of tries, incrementally getting better, until you’re able to craft something that’s masterful.
If you want to get really good at doing something, then it means doing it over and over again. How do you specifically practice creating a world changing business? At least for right now, I think it means that you have to overlook the low hanging fruit and create the businesses that haven’t been attempted, or haven’t been done successfully.
In the world of social media, constantly producing is the name of the game.
- Musicians can put out a song a week.
- Comedians can put out a show a week.
It’s the compounding effect of consistent content that is rewarded.
But I don’t want to have a long period of time between each piece of “content” that’s produced. 30 days seems like a difficult, but achievable goal to aim for. And what else would my content be but a new, novel product?
For the ideas that are even slightly successful, they’ll create the income I need to eventually leave the work I do on the side so it could become the full time job. Then it’s off to the races!
Now imagine just what 5 years of compounded effort could achieve. Hopefully I’ll have at least dramatically improved a few thousand people’s quality of life. I suspect that the first 20 years will be relatively slow in terms of impact. It takes time to become really good at anything, and especially to achieve a goal this magnitude.
Like an exponential curve, most of the growth will occur right towards the end. That’s when I’ll have the most opportunity, experience and audience size to really build some impactful stuff.
7. Expand to new countries
I’ve written before about how I think the best innovators, especially in the freelance economy space, will have one big distinguishing trait: they’ll be polyglots.
There’s billions of people in the world whose first language is not English, and after becoming good at building products for English speakers, I think there’s a big opportunity to maximize impact by building products for people all around the world.
This means actually having to learn new languages, and even moving to the countries I intend to build for. Realistically, I could see this happening somewhere in the next 5–10 years.
Having a sensitivity to the freelancing economy across as many cultures and languages as possible seems, at least now, to be beneficial because it helps to extract new patterns and develop new intuitions about this field as a whole. Consequently, it would improve my ability to build products that have an exceptional product market fit.
TL:DR
- Prioritize creating impact. Profit will follow
- Always be looking for new patterns in the industry
- Use those patterns to build new businesses every month
- Grow an audience by building for them regularly
- Expand my efforts to new countries and different languages
Read this post and more on my Typeshare Social Blog
