My plan to start working on my ideas
So, as I wrote in my previous blog post, The struggle of working on my ideas, I have lots of ideas but I find it very difficult to actually start working on them. There are lots of reasons for this but mainly it comes down to overthinking things.
In order to sort this, I have decided to try the following approach, which might work or not! We will not know until I try I guess :D
My plan is inspired by The 12 Week Year book by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington; the Small Bets concept created by Daniel Vassallo and the countless posts from fellow indie developers about creating one app per month for a year and the different variations of it.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with the book or Small Bets community in any way. I just found the concepts interesting and tried to adapt them into a process that might work for me.
My Plan
So the general idea is to work in seasons. I will split the year into four quarters (Q1 - Q4), with each quarter being a season focusing on one theme.
The theme will be a single or couple of words that describe the major work / tasks I want to focus on during that season. If I feel like I have accomplished the main theme before the end of the quarter, I can start the next one a bit earlier.
I am not sure yet how I will decide whether a season was a success or not but I will figure that when the time comes.
In the meant time, I have decided that this season (Q4 of 2026) will be all about “Learning / Training” and the next one (Q1 of 2027) will be about “Small Bets”.
Q4 2026 - “Learning / Training”
For this season I am going to forget about having the best idea, every idea needing to be successful or needing to make money from my projects.
The goal is to start learning and improving.
I have always wanted to properly look into SwiftUI as professionally I have mainly worked with UIKit and have only looked into SwiftUI to see how things were changing. I also want to catchup with some of the recent updates in iOS development, and advancements in cross-platform development and AI. So this season will be about learning, experimenting and getting back into the habit of making things.
Q1 2027 - “Small Bets”
This is where things should get a bit more interesting - I hope - as I will start working on my ideas.
The goal is to build and release.
The focus will be small ideas that satisfy three requirements:
- I find them interesting,
- I feel I can develop them relatively quickly, and
- I feel people might want to try them.
I think satisfying all three requirements will keep me interested and motivated while also keeping the scope small enough so I can actually finish things.
Each idea is essentially a small bet and each idea should not take more than 3-4 weeks to get an initial MVP out for people to test. The plan is to build, release, collect feedback and iterate quickly.
When an idea is released and people start using it the “bet” is done. I might market it a bit and I will start collecting feedback but the plan will be to move on to the next “bet”. Based on the feedback, I will decide if it’s worth expanding / working on it more further down the line.
Hopefully this plan will help a bit with my analysis paralysis and overthinking.
Let’s see what happens next I guess.
-Koke