In my vision for this site, I stated that I want to help people build better things, specifically creative based products, but feel these lessons can be applied more broadly.
And I still believe that to be the case, but after consideration I would restate it as such:
Give insight on how to build better creative products.
I anticipate doing this through personal lessons, book and article suggestions and guest writers.
Going off the theme of this post, that’s one type of evolution; evolving my vision to be more concise and direct. But, the impetus for this post came from a stream of writing exercise in which I was trying to get to the root of why my posts didn’t feel as tied together towards that vision as I would like and how to resolve it.
Through that exercise I established that a key function of this blog at it’s onset is to invite you, the reader, into the journey of creating something from step one as well and the struggle was how to balance that with posts full of the depth that I consider valuable. This blog will evolve, serving as a roadmap for growth (and missteps), like the great Pat Flynn as well as building towards Reduce User Friction and the other pieces I wrote about in my post on strategy.
Allowing your product to evolve and in some ways show you what it’s intended to be is a freedom you have to be open to. Your path is not a straight line, there will be twists and turns. This does not mean following your vision blindly. It does mean, if something doesn’t feel right or if something’s not working as you expect, step back, take a breath and identify the gap.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” – Henry Ford
Henry Ford’s quote about people asking for faster horses is thrown around quite a bit in reference to trusting your gut. Trusting your gut is an essential skill for entrepreneurship and leads us to have a better idea of what to test and the questions to ask, but eliminating customer research and following your intuition blindly is irresponsible. Take those assumptions, get out there and test them. That could mean observing people using similar products, split tests or running a survey. Depends on what you’re hoping to find.
As I get this further along I’ll share the user research and testing towards fine-tuning and optimizing this site.
Evolution – Belief: Optional / Participation: Mandatory