I spent $28k on projects… Here’s how to just start doing something

You’re building something.

But you’re faced with issues like:

1. What do I build first? Should it be this feature, or that?
2. How do I build this? I don’t have the programming knowledge for this.

My context 

Yes, I’m running a design agency that’s doing annual reports, ghostwriting, and websites. That might be different from your full-time job that you’re holding. 

But don’t let that be an excuse. When I first started building, I also had a full-time job. 

The CV won’t last, but the problem will

I confess. When I first built savethesocialworker.com, it was something to build my CV, and while away the time during COVID.

I realised I could finish my job in 3 hours, and that the rest of the contracted 5 hours used to be for standing round the coffee machine, or just walking around people’s desk talking.

Remember those times? Yeah, they were great times when we finally didn’t people tapping all over our shoulders all day.

But then I started getting web traffic. And then emails of people thanking me for it.

And that’s when the stuff got real.

Over the past 5 years, I built:

But this also ended up costing me around 32.5k, with the bulk of the 30k going to the costs of publishing. 

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not to say

oh I’m so great,

You should learn from me.

Rather, it’s to say one thing.

I had no design, coding, or business background.

I graduated with a social work degree.

If I could build some stuff, you can too.

Solve your own problem

I was fortunate because I was selfish. I didn’t have some grand plans to help others.

I just wanted to help myself.

So even though I had no design or coding background, it helped that I was building something to solve my own problem.

With savethesocialworker.com (STSW), I simply wanted to

1. Deal with my own admin work faster

But then came the problem.

I couldn’t plug in the SSNET (the central case management system) into an API that allowed me to

1. Build a faster way to upload case notes
2. Directly access case notes without having to go through at least 2 minutes of loading

So the simplest thing I knew was to

1. interview thought leaders in the field and see what they thought about it,
2. And write articles about it,
3. Hope people read about it and use the ideas there.

So STSW then became a content site.

You might say,

eh that’s not really a tech solution.

That’s just a blog, no?

But it’s something people use. That’s the point.

Yes, we might never have a billion users like Facebook.

But just impacting a few, in key pain points, is enough.

Set your expectations low on the change you will make, and you will actually start, and sustain something.

Between the problem and a solution is a habit

That’s also when I began to see that between existing problems, and their solutions, there was already an existing habit that people were using to solve their solutions.

And if we try to insert a new habit into what’s already being done people wouldn’t necessarily change – just for your product.

One of my worst failures was (trying to) inspire people during COVID by designing handwritten cards. I thought the pain point was:

1. People were lonely and needed a personal touch

And my solution became hand-calligraphed cards.

To scale usage of the product you build, it needs to be more aligned to what people already do.

So if I take the case of FormSG it was something people were already comfortable doing – with Google Forms – in a new environmental use case, this time in the public service sphere.

We might not be able to come up with a paradigm shifting innovation in tech, but anyone can plug and play an existing solution.

So you might not be able to do paradigm shifting ideas like:

1. Skype – see people in a different space
   
   1. But it was Zoom that scaled the user-friendliness of it in a pandemic driven era
2. PayPal and X – people paying people virtually
   
   1. But it was Stripe that made it fuss-free

All these examples show one thing.

Being a late mover is not that bad, because it’s often reliability, over features, that matter

It’s the classic Apple vs Android problem. Why does the Apple iPhone continue being so well regarded despite so much more expensive per feature, than any other Android phone?

Not really because iPhone is exciting.

It’s because it’s boring.

Predictable.

Reliable.

It does what it needs to do without crashing.

They simply solved the biggest pain point with the first iPhone.

1. Touch smart phones were slow,
2. Not very accurate with touches (often needing a stylus)
3. And often crashed.

I know because as a 11 year old in 2007, pre iPhone, my favourite game on my dad’s Sony Ericsson touch phone just kept killing the phone.

When we think of designing a solution, the classic framework is to think first about

1. What’s the demographic we are defining this solution for?
2. What are they thinking when they face this problem?
3. What do they do?

But the more important thing is to actually start from what they currently do – and then move backwards.

You start to see insights you never saw before.

For example, when we wanted to create a book for social workers, we initially wondered who would read this.

But then we realised that starting with what they were currently doing was probably a better bet.

And when we started to do this – we saw that they were

1. Scrolling through their Instagrams when they had time
2. Trying to read random infographics they could find on social work (that was more engaging)
3. Reading research reports, but then finding them too dense to understand

Sure it doesn’t sound like big money.

But for me it was success, because we managed to get social workers to pay for something that would develop them.

Which brings me to the last point.

It’s not distribution, it’s delivery

You don’t need the best product.

Heck, you don’t even need something that looks fancy.

You actually just needs something that works, at the right time, at the right place, so that people will use it.

So there are 3 elements. People often focus on what works, with their feature set.

When you ask them how they will get people to use it, the most common answers are,

social media

share on Telegram and Whatsapp groups.

This focuses on distribution.

Not delivery.

Delivery is the fulfilment of the problem,

at the time and place people need it,

with your solution.

When we first built liveyoungandwell.com, we wanted to solve this problem:

1. Young adults seem to have few handles around their career – with questions like how to deal with toxic colleagues, when to quit, how to ask for a promotion (basically questions across the employee lifecycle at different stages, from onboarding to exit)

So we started with a website that now gets 14k visitors a month (yes tiny I know). We tried to solve that with:

1. Articles filled with personal narratives of key adulting experiences (how to be a first-time manager), giving advice that we personally tried, or which we had seen others try
2. Articles tackling key decision points to grow your career (like should you pay $1.8k for that SkillsFuture ACLP course to upgrade yourself, or to go for the $1600 organisational development course from Tong Yee’s And.sg)
3. Personal finance articles with skin in the game, for example, with products we personally tried, because we figured that most of the content in the market was aimed at conversion, and not necessarily communicating what was good or bad

Delivery through SEO

But there was a problem. Everyone else was ranked better than us. And personal finance was a space that was dominated by players like Seedly that had been there for years.

How do you win?

Well, the answer is found in Google.

In our company, we have a motto.

And it’s not:

In God we trust…

But it’s “In Google we trust”.

We focused on queries where there was low competition, and found niches where the content delivered was not great.

For example, if you look at the 3rd ranked article on best debit cards, you would see that it’s focused on laundry listing – as are the rest like Seedly, MoneySmart and Wise. How does this help you make better decisions?

So over the years we kept trying to do the same formula.

1. Find the low competition keyword around finance and careers that was not adequately serving young adults
2. Write something that we could genuinely add to

And the results…

Yes, we aren’t rich yet.

But that’s not the point.

The point is to have fun along the way.

Put your money where your mouth is

In the end, talking is easy.

Doing is hard.

Spending your own money, to make the change you want to see, is even crazier.

And that’s why my best advice is always to…

don’t wait for people to give you money to give you permission to do something.

If you want something to happen…

Do it yourself.

And tomorrow’s too late.