It as an honor to get to work on a product that can help those we love as much as those we don't even know.
Overview
Great products should make you feel something wonderful and should be a sheer joy to use. Beyond entertainment, those products that are intended to help us can easily earn the title of great.
The Problem
In January 2020, my wife had a hysterectomy. She seemed to be healing up normally and feeling fairly decent, but, every so often, we both had questions….Google and medical forums were of little help.
The Idea
What if an app could be built to leverage communication in such a way that, for example, people that are going through the same surgeries can communicate with one another, beforehand, and afterward, to get some emotional support and peace of mind? Taking my wife's case, for example, it would've been really cool if she could either have a 1-on-1 or a small group chat going with other women that were getting hysterectomy's done around the same time frame...maybe one person, a week earlier than she did, and one person, a week after. Yes, everyone heals differently, but I think this would be invaluable to measuring the progress of healing and would provide peace of mind that someone isn't going through it alone.
The Journey
Once the idea had marinated enough and I had some free time, I decided to embark on the pathway to an MVP. Originally, I had no intention of going it alone, for several reasons:
- Multiple heads going in the same direction are infinitely more powerful than one.
- At the FAANG Co. I worked for, the focus was always on small groups of smart and creative people.
Indie Hackers is a community that I and thousands of others are involved with. It's a great place to gather inspiration and to kickstart the motivation to really build something. Initially, I created a Typeform to introduce fullstack developers to my idea. The second phase would be an invite into a Slack workspace to hash it out. I culled around a dozen developers and began vetting them at the same time I was embarking on my own development journey via The Odin Project down the rabbit hole of RoR. Here's how that turned out:
This wouldn't be an incredibly complicated app. Attention to detail was a must.
The target market would be end users that were going through some of the toughest trials and tribulations of their life. It had to be simple and it had to work.
70% of all app users will delete an app if they cannot check it out before you give them the opportunity to explore it; before they are invested in it. Knowing this, I delayed asking for anything from them (an email address), until they were several screens into the app. You have to add value, always.
Conclusion
Still pre-MVP, but I do hope it gets brought to market one day as I think the niche role it fills is more than justified.
What I learned
- Sometimes, during our roughest and darkest times we can still find inspiration.
- The idea is the easy part; the execution is where the rubber meets the road.
- If you're truly passionate about what you're doing, it isn't 'work'.