Today marks two years worth of #buildinpublic updates for this project. Last month was the first month I skipped doing an update because I felt like I had nothing to show for June. I considered ceasing these entirely but #buildinpublic is all about radical transparency even when it’s uncomfortable. The whole project has taken some zigs and zags and I’m going to focus on the green shoots for this update and summarize as candidly as possible where everything stands.
The main developments since last update are that I’ve realized I need to fundamentally change the focus here and recommit this effort to a direction that’s more viable with a sustainable revenue path vs. the utopian movement I was hoping would arise organically. I still think it’s possible to get to the vision of smart knowledge workers coordinating around the world to solve world problems and earn a respectable living for doing so via bounties. But I believe I need to tip the dominoes in the right order by first selling this as a B2B service for organizations that have a budget to pay for coordination fabric for their employees.
Once I came to this realization the path became a bit clearer. Problemattic is the community that sits atop a tech stack that can now power other communities. The pilot for HATCH proved this back in April and I did another small pilot for the Founders Reboot conference here in Lisbon this past week that gave another proof point.
Reformulating and Rebranding
My last podcast guest Dave Zaboski (who is absolutely fantastic, go listen to his episode) helped convince me that Problemattic can be the movement but “Stone Soup” is the underlying fabric that can be used to bring villagers together to accomplish great things. Funnily enough he and I both independently came up with this metaphor - him live on his podcast interview and me two years ago to the day at this Lightning Talk.
Accordingly I’ve spun out the underlying tech platform and rebranded it as “Stone Soup.”
The idea now is to approach conferences, intentional communities, and corporate CSR departments and see if I can sell this into organizations as alignment fabric. Having seen all the fluff junk software that gets sold into corporations, I feel confident this software holds incredible value for companies looking to push decision making to the edges and incentivize by outcomes. The value prop for each customer segment here is slightly different but the platform is flexible enough to support those three segments nicely. I’m going to shift emphasis now to working on signing some customers as a next step.
I re-envisioned a whole new onboarding flow for how to get users invested via working with an adaptive AI agent. I now have a quick & dirty stopgap solution in place using open source TypeBot that approximates that chat-based onboarding experience and the idea is that I should have enough value in this current product to be able to make some sales with what I have. Doing so will either validate demand and give me capital/motivation to get some development help to implement the missing functionality… or it won’t. And failing to make any sales of the current setup would be a wakeup call to rethink the viability of this venture.
What I’m Thinking
It’s squarely sales / bizdev / outreach time. I’m tapping various connections to get in front of anyone who runs a community or organization that’s challenged with aligning its members around outcomes and optimizing its capital and talent deployment efficiency. I’m likely going to retake the 30x500 course I did many years ago because their sales safari and content marketing process is a solid framework that would be hugely beneficial for this next phase. I did this Nocode Lisboa talk last month that was well-received but I need to be putting myself out there more via these public talks to cast a wider net to find a technical co-founder.
Open Questions
- Is it better to hunt one single vertical like conferences, CSR depts or non-profits for this outreach? Or hedge bets and set a bunch of snares with different content marketing and see where the most resonance lies?
- Is this new approach still compatible with the vision of getting all the world’s problems and fixers under one roof or do I need to let that go? Potentially achievable with freemium model and basically charge if the tribes want fully-private, partitioned access… or just ditch that vision entirely and focus on selling private instances to companies going forward?
- What are the watering holes, channels, value props and messaging for reaching and converting these prospects? ← 30x500 should help immensely with figuring out this stuff.
Next Month’s Focus
Platform
- Need to make vector search respect the same tribe privacy rules enforced by Bubble.
- Make it possible to support a demo sandbox that doesn’t contaminate the production site while being able to run it multi-tenant.
Bizdev
This is 90% the focus going forward. This will involve a lot of scrappy manual research and outreach to start until I find a promising vein and can start to automate/delegate the outreach and nurture process.
Events
No planned events.
Content
No pods but retaking the 30x500 course in order to answer the above questions, refine the Stone Soup offering and get it in front of the right people.
Traffic Snapshot
The technical roadmap as always can be found here.