As Barry wrote in his recent blogpost, we're busy building prototypes here at Good Enough.
It's weird to be in this situation. Most of the Good Enough team are used to working on just one software at a time, focusing on steadily improving it. But right now we're doing the opposite. For the next few months we'll have no revenue and no customers. Most afternoons, we won't even know what we'll be working on the next morning. Exciting times! 😅
It would be irresponsible of me to not warn you that this is not how you start a business! Let's say that you're looking to open a store to sell comic books. The right way to go about that would be to imagine how you want the store to look and feel, to think seriously about what kind of titles you want to carry, to figure out how the store can (eventually) make a profit, and then to find the people who can make it all work. You know––a business plan!
With Good Enough, however, we've done things backwards. We don't have a product idea, and we don't have a plan (yet) for making this financially sustainable, but we've gone out and assembled a team. (Imagine having an empty storefront with no books, no bookshelves, no cash registers––but a full staff milling around ready to work.)
And now, instead of zeroing in on one particular product, we've decided to spend the rest of the year experimenting and making prototypes.
Our goal––and our hope––is that by January 2024 we'll have an idea that we feel really good about committing all our energy into. After we have the idea, we will come up with a plan to make money with that idea.
Will we get there? Probably! We have plenty of ideas now, which means we'll just have to make a choice come January. Turning that idea into a real product isn't likely to be that hard either––that's something we're good (enough) at. The difficult part comes after the product launch: finding people who want to use our product, and convincing them that our product is worth paying for.
Oh, right––we've decided to call this prototype-building phase Cosmic Maelstrom. Patrick mentioned that what we're doing reminds him of how NASA's space exploration, which might seem outlandish, even pointless, can actually lead (and has led) to unexpected discoveries that benefit our lives on earth (such as the memory foam that's in my pillow––thank you, NASA!). Obviously we're not comparing what we're doing to NASA, but it's fun to imagine ourselves as space explorers! Besides, Cosmic Maelstrom just sounds cool.