Recap Week #1!

We started the 80-day startup one week ago, so time for a recap!

The past week was like pouring a foundation of sorts. Much of what we’ve started isn’t really visible yet, but we’ve decided on what (and why) we’re going to build so that the actual building and marketing can begin. Some important decisions and topics we wrote about were:

• What not to worry about when getting started
• Given we’re building a software startup, what categories we considered, and why we think some work better than others
• What ideas we consider bad and why not to do them
• All the constraints we consider when starting a web startup
• A summary of our wishlist for the app we’re going to build
• The decision’s been made: what we are going to build
• What the competition and disruption looks like
• Different features to consider when building a product
• Skills you need to build bootstrap a SaaS business

The idea

As we discussed on Day 3, we’re going to build Thymer: an editor (IDE), but for tasks and planning. We want to solve the problem we keep ending up with todo.txt files because it’s way faster to type out thoughts that way. It just doesn’t scale well, there’s no structure and doesn’t work in teams. We believe an editor specifically tailored to tasks and planning would be the best of both worlds. Productivity is a very busy space, but we think it would be a novel approach compared to classic todo lists and Kanban-style apps. And as a nice bonus it fits the 80-day startup well in terms of topics we’d cover!

What’s next

As we wrote in the initial stages of a SaaS product, we’re now moving on from the Idea phase to the Prototype phase. We’ll start to work out the exact details and prototype parts of the product, while we come up with a way to find some initial users in our target audience who might be interested in the product.

As a preview of some of the technical prototyping for the coming days, we livestreamed some initial coding we did today.

Links

As always you can view all topics we’ve written about so far at https://80daystartup.com/topics/.

We also decided this was a good time to finally start using Twitter. You can follow Diederik at https://twitter.com/jdvhouten/ and Wim at https://twitter.com/wcools/ (Wim’s livestream is at https://www.twitch.tv/wcools/).

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Thanks for following our story! Let us know on Twitter or at [email protected] if you have any questions or topics you would like us to cover 🙂