Walking the perimeter of an idea

Season two of Startup ends with this postmortem thought:

I’m not starting another company without doing a loooott of surveys first… …like, look at the competitors, look at why this doesn’t exist, really think about why this isn’t already there. ‘Cause there’s a reason. (S2 Ep10)

I suggested recently (in, uh, an email application to jobs @ the parent company of this domain) that I could imagine an awesome app/apps built around P2. P2 has strong internal use, making for a quick feedback loop for feature iterations. Plus — instantly useful to 400+ people! Not to mention The Twitter-Killer Market!

And yet, I haven’t spent that much time imagining why there isn’t already a loving family of P2-focused apps out there. Which brings us to this 2015 interview with Matt Mullenweg that addresses this very question, of why P2/o2 isn’t a bigger deal right now.

Simply put, it’s all about focus. Or, as Apple said in 2013:

there are a thousand no’s
for every yes.

That might just be my favorite Apple thing ever. I think about it whenever I put the brakes on my clients’ feature requests. I crave it when I think about where I might work next. It occasionally pops into my head when I’m grocery shopping. And if there’s ever a reason to make a choice that leaves you feeling bereft, do it for the one-in-a-thousand Yes.

To do: Enable the To-do module

And then click around on it.

For example

Thinking about https://automattic.com/work-with-us/ and https://p2demo.wordpress.com/ (and, well, https://p2classicdemo.wordpress.com/)…

Some little mobile feature spitballs:

• List/browse P2 collections
• Show contributors to the current P2 (Maybe already handled by “Authors” widget)
• Sorting — show media/docs
• Blogring – Like Medium, but better? (Maybe already handled by “Blogs I Follow” widget)

And then

He switched to P2, and played around with it on mobile. A little WordPress for iOS here, a little mobile browser, here.

The developer tried to imagine using P2 for project management, which got him wondering — is there a niche that a sleek new P2 app could fill?

In the beginning

There was an iOS developer who wanted to find and join a company with a lot of heart. The developer had spent his iOS life thus far as a remote freelancer. He’d had great clients, plenty of free reign, and a flexible schedule. Things were good. 

And yet, he’d started thinking it was time for something new. Time to work on something enduring, beloved, weighty. Time to build alongside other developers. Time to commit to a real product, and to an established team.

That was the idea, anyway.