Business update, week 3
August 10, 2025 at 11:06 PM
Hello! This is the second weekly update on my mission to start a business. It’s actually been three weeks since I started (I didn’t write an update the first week), so from here on I’ll be labeling these based on the weeks since I started.
This was a very busy week and completely different from the previous one in terms of what I was doing day-to-day. Less thinking and more doing.
And I sold an actual thing to an actual person! Who wasn’t a family member or friend!
What goals did I set last week?
- Focus on just one or maybe two problem areas, rather than going down a bunch of different rabbit holes
- Identify some people in my areas of focus that I realistically could talk to in order to learn about any problems they’re dealing with
What did I accomplish this week?
The “1k Challenge”
A decision I made after quitting was to enroll in Ali Abdaal’s “1k Challenge” course - an online course aimed at helping people like me earn their first $1,000 online.
I’ve found his YouTube videos very helpful in figuring out what I should be doing at this stage of starting a business, and felt that the course was sufficiently oriented around taking action to be worth the money. The timing of it lined up perfectly with my quitting timeline as well - the course started a little over a week ago. And they offer a full refund if you make it to the second-to-last milestone (earning $100), but fail to reach the $1000 threshold. I’m very confident I can at least reach that point, so all things considered it seems like a low risk and potentially high upside expenditure.
1k Challenge Mission 1 - Earn your first dollar online
The course is structured as a series of missions where you have to prove that you’ve finished the prior mission before moving on to the next. Mission 1 was to post a “support my business for $1” offer and get someone to pay for it. This was mainly to have everyone get all the online payment infrastructure worked out so that we wouldn’t have to worry about that later, and to start getting us used to reaching out to people, asking for help, selling things, etc. If you’re reading this, you helped me complete this so thank you!
1k Challenge Lectures
There were lots of good lectures this week that helped clarify for me the basic approach I should be taking in the first month of trying to start a business. Some of the topics covered:
- Identifying your craft skills (skills / knowledge / talents you have that could theoretically be monetized) [my craft skills]
- Exercises to help find potential niches (specific topics/audiences to look for problems in)
- Strategies for figuring out if there’s a market for a product before you expend lots of effort building it
- “Archaeologist” vs “Architect” approaches to choosing your niche - archaeologists ‘dig’ around exploring a bunch of ideas, while architects pick one idea and commit to it (it’s a weird metaphor but you get the idea). Most novice entrepreneurs should be directionally more architect-y. They get fixated on finding a ‘perfect idea’ often at the expense of ever committing to anything for long enough to be successful. So it’s better to just pick something that seems like it probably can work with sufficient effort and commit to it for a while.
The last point here very much aligns with my takeaway from last week that I felt like I was jumping around between lots of ideas, all of which seemed okay but not great. So I’m trying to accept that no idea is going to feel perfect and I just need to pick something and commit to it for a while.
1k Challenge Mission 2 - Sell a $10 dollar digital product
Mission two was to sell something online and get someone to pay $10 for it. One of the ideas I came up with, and the one I ended up trying to sell, was a tool for quickly creating Spanish flashcards as I read Spanish text. This is actually a tool I’ve wanted to make in the past, as it solves a frustration I’ve had as I try to learn Spanish (it’s cumbersome to copy and paste words into a translator, then paste the words in the flashcard app, switching between several tabs in the process). So I figured what the heck, I want this to exist anyway and I bet other people have the same problem, so lets see if anyone will pay me $10 to build it.
Lo and behold, someone else from the class (of ~1400 people) saw my offer and paid me $10! Technically my brother and mom also paid, but having a stranger pay was pretty cool!
So I took the next few days to build the tool which you can try out here (will only work on desktop currently)
Beyond the first sale
The next mission for the class is to make 9 more sales of my $10 product, i.e. reach $100 dollars in sales. I don’t really think that, in its current state, my tool is worth $10 to very many people. I’m sure there are a lot of very specific people out there that would find it useful, but I don’t have a realistic way of reaching them right now.
At the same time, as I’ve been building it I’ve had about 1000 ideas for other language learning tools I can add to make it more useful. I’m pretty sure that with another week or two of work, I can expand it into something that a significant number of people would feel is worth paying $10 for.
The early feedback I’ve received is enough of a signal that there could be something here that I’m willing to spend a few more weeks trying to build this out into a more full-fledged product. If I add a bunch of those features and still am not able to get people to pay for it, then I’ll pivot to something else. Worst case scenario I’ve built myself a great language learning tool and lost a couple weeks of runway.
So while it would be great if I can hit my 9 new sales goal this week, my real objective is to make my tool better, and to continue…
talking to real people
The last thing I did this week was, in the big picture, probably the most important thing I’ve done so far in my effort to start a business. I identified some people who might be in the audience I’m trying to build products for (language learning tools), and talked to them. I had built this up in my head as a difficult and scary thing, but in reality it was (a) very interesting, (b) very informative, and (c) kind of fun?
It immediately has become clear to me that this is the one weird trick to starting a successful business. You just have to find real people who have real goals and/or problems, talk to them about those goals and/or problems, and then figure out how you can use your toolkit of skills and ingenuity to help them reach those goals or solve those problems.
I’m still not sure if language learning tools is the right space for me to build a product in. But I almost don’t really care if this first product attempt works or not, because I’m seeing the big picture of how starting businesses works, and getting practice doing each of the steps.
Did I meet my goals?
Yes. I spent Monday coming up with the flashcard idea and someone paid for it within a day. I then spent the rest of the week working on that idea. I made a list of some people I could talk to about language learning and language learning tools, talked to three of them already, and intend to talk to several more this week. So I did exactly what my goals were.
What’s working / what isn’t?
This week certainly felt better than last week. After I got a customer, I spent 72 hours building the tool I sold them, and then after getting some positive feedback, decided to take the next step of seeking out more potential users and trying to figure out what additional language learning tools might be useful to them. I spoke to actual people about their actual real life experience with language learning. Everything I did this week seemed like the ‘correct’ things I should be doing to start a business.
I’m not convinced yet that “language learning tools” is really a great product space, but the process I followed this week felt very coherent. If at the end of the month, I decide the language tools idea isn’t going to go anywhere, and just follow the exact same process with other ideas for a couple more months, I’m pretty sure that I will find something that works.
There’s one other realization I had this week - I should build a software product. Software is what I’m great at, I love doing it, and I have a particular set of software skills that gives me some competitive advantages. With software you can build a prototype of anything for free and share it with anyone in the world instantly. And the economics of a software business are just so good that if you have the skills to do one, you should probably just do a software business.
What are my goals for next week?
- Conduct 10 additional target-audience interviews
- Get my language learning tool to the point that I feel personally like it’s worth $10/month. Currently it’s a pretty minimal tool and I feel a bit uneasy asking people to pay for it. But within a week I believe I can add enough features that for many people, it’s worth $10/ month.
Final Thoughts
I have a better sense of direction than the last few weeks. I’m going to continue in the language learning tools space for at least another two weeks and re-evaluate after that. My goal with this is as much to practice all the skills that go into validating an idea, finding customers, and iterating a product as it is to actually create a successful product. Come September and October I don’t want to stay in that mindset but for August I think it’s a healthy approach.
Bye until next week!
Jake