Ideating in public
What it's like to give the world front-row seats to what happens before you even build
In case you missed it, there is an enduring debate in the startup community about whether building in public is a good idea.
Those in favor cite networking, concept refinement through feedback, early adopter market support, and community building. Those opposed claim it can be a major distraction, diminishes competitive advantage, and creates the opportunity for a mountain of criticism, much of which can be not particularly constructive.
In case you haven’t guessed, I’m in camp public.
Building in public is one thing, but this week an internet friend pointed out that what I’m kind of doing is ideating in public. I have nothing in market yet.
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I first posted about this adventure sharing a whole bunch of disparate ideas I had on my list on LinkedIn and TikTok. Six weeks later, I’ve refined that list a lot… but even the ideas that have gone the distance have changed. Some a little, and some quite considerably.
I posted on TikTok recently about how I go through the process of validating a business idea and de-risking it. (Embedded below in case you’d like to see in full, but the best TL;DW I can give is that baked into every idea you have is a set of assumptions. You need to validate those assumptions or minimize how critical they are to your success before you move ahead with going to market.)
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What I didn’t explicitly cover in that video is that in the process of working through your assumptions, your idea often evolves. Either because you learn something or because you need to reduce the reliance your idea has on a particular assumption.
Here’s a live-action example.
When I first had the idea of creating a third space / laundromat hybrid I was envisioning the kind of space that was part cafe/arcade/bar/something and part laundromat. I’ve seen it done successfully in other countries, NYC needs laundromats in a way no other city in the world does, and humans are increasingly craving third spaces. I was going to find a big, old laundromat somewhere, buy it, and then refurb it.
No brainer, right? Wrong.
Baked into my idea was a big assumption: I could find an existing laundromat in the right kind of neighborhood that had the amount of space I needed. This is where I ran into the first problem. Doing some research I quickly realized that laundromats with that amount of space are hard to come by. Most of them are tiny, or overflowing with machines. First big assumption: invalidated.
So, pivot time.
My next thought was that I could find an empty space and lease it. Sounds reasonable. But here we find problem number two. The reality is that rent in Manhattan is not cheap and to put it bluntly, the numbers just don’t add up, unless you’re planning to make really good money on the cafe/arcade/bar/whatever part of the space. But TBH, cafes/arcades/bars often fail - for a reason. Laundromats do not. Second assumption: invalidated.
In all this research though, I had visited a very long list of laundromats (about sixty by this point) across Manhattan and Brooklyn. And I’d noticed something in particular - Brooklyn has some very nice laundromats (e.g. above). Manhattan does not. Nice people maybe, OK spaces, but nothing that really stands out.
So then I worked the numbers a bit more and started to evolve my idea: what if I had a smaller space with a killer customer experience, that was just as clean, fun, and distinct as my original idea but in a much more compact space? And instead of self-service, I’d offer full service. Different business model, but just as workable.
There you have it. Ideation in public… nothing in market yet (heck, I don’t even have a business name registered), and it’s already changed.
Til next week,
Sam
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