Build nothing new

By Georg Malahov

In September I bought Mikhail Tabunov's course "Baza" — it's about launching pet projects all the way to first sales. The course cost me fifteen hundred euros, which is real money for me. But I've been circling the same problem for years: I know and love how to build, and I've never learned how to sell what I build. I already have launches behind me that went nowhere, and the feedback they produced was plentiful — and almost all negative. Time to learn from people who have actually done this.

I watched the first two modules. The first is about a "personal concept": sit down and write out your own background, what comes easily to you, which projects you'd want to get into and which you definitely wouldn't, whether you're up for paid traffic, for example. Out of that you assemble a filter, and later you run your ideas through it. The second module is about markets and competition: how to copy proven working projects and how to screen ideas. It's all laid out so logically and simply that my main reaction while watching was: why didn't I think of this myself?

The course community is a separate pleasure. There are a hundred and forty-six people in the chat, and everyone introduced themselves: some have launched and earned already, some, like me, built things and never launched. There are people with projects similar to mine. I read all the intros in a row and a day later couldn't remember any of them — and caught myself on a familiar thought: ideas and contacts come and go, and I don't write them down or structure them. This time I want to do the course properly: attend every call, write down my thoughts after each one, and actually review them later.

But the main thing I took from the first modules is the stance for the whole course. Build nothing new and nothing big. Take the simplest possible project and get it to a working version as fast and as safely as possible — to a label and to first money. It doesn't have to make millions; I need at least some positive cash flow that I can scale, or use to fund the next projects. For someone who sits down every time to build "the truly big thing," that's an almost insultingly modest goal. Which is probably exactly why it feels right.

Which project I'll take, the personal concept will decide: I have several unfinished ones in the drawer, and one of them seems closest to a working version. By the end of the course it has to be up on the internet with a price tag, bringing in first sales — otherwise it will turn out I bought myself not a launch but some interesting reading.

Off to watch module three and finish writing my personal concept.