Last Thursday1 I was laid off from my 9-5 job. In addition to this being a rather shit tech economy to find yourself dumped in, my wife and I are also in the middle of a real estate transaction that is now at risk - we’re in the process of moving to WA, and have already sold our home in TX. We were just waiting on a letter from my employer stating that my move to WA would not affect my job in order to get final approval on our new mortgage. Instead of giving me a letter, they laid me off.
My wife and I are moving, that’s a given. As it stands at the writing of this, I have 44 days to save this real-estate transaction and not drive into WA with all our possessions, homeless and looking for a rental with a wife, 2 dogs and a cat. I need to satisfy our mortgage underwriting by either:
- Securing a new 9-5 with sufficient salary
- Finding and securing a yuge investor for my "startup" that I'm working on in the wee hours of the mornings.
"Startup" is in scare quotes because I don't have an audience or a product. I have a bunch of code that, if you squint hard enough and imagine it all glued together, might be a compelling product. At this point it’s not even a prototype. Obviously I don't think I could secure funding in 44 days with a vision, no industry presence2 and just a bunch of code that doesn’t actually do anything yet. So I guess I need to find a new job.
Finding a job in a down economy is a war of attrition - a numbers game. You need to optimize for company intros through recruiters and referrals - that takes time. Outbound and warm inbound recruiters need time to present your CV, cold inbound recruiters trickle in over time, and referrals take time to move through hiring pipelines. Companies are generally slower to hire, even those that claim to want to move fast. Feedback loops are longer than in a hot economy. You find you have more downtime than you’d hope you’d have.
Practicing skills or learning new ones is always a great way to spend your down time between speaking with recruiters and hiring teams. It keeps your skills fresh and ensures you’re at least aware of the current zeitgeist around building technology.
Last time I was unemployed, I tried to branch out and do contract work while bootstrapping a software development company. I managed to do a handful of small contracts before the work dried up and I had to find a full time job. It took me 3 weeks to find a job, but ultimately I was unemployed for about 2 months all in total.
This time, finding a job is the higher priority over whatever else I do that isn’t finding work. While I could learn yet another programming language (Rust seems to be what the cool kids are writing in these days), what if I was to try to push my "startup" to a point that it's a startup? What would I need to do and what would that look like?
I know I just said I needed to find a job, and here I am talking about building a startup again - what gives? Well, just because I might start working toward a goal, that doesn’t mean that the goal is the actual goal - it’s just a good direction to head in. It also doesn’t mean that failing to achieve that goal (I’ve already identified that I can’t reach it) isn’t itself useful and that we won’t get anything out of the process itself. Mastering the process of trying to reach this goal is itself my ultimate goal.
So how to go about it?
Going backwards from being funded, I’d obviously need a pitch deck, something to pitch, and some numbers to put into a pitch deck to bring to meetings. While I could create a pitch deck right now and research/massage 80% of the numbers, the "something to pitch" - and that last pesky 20% of data - requires a prototype that is earning revenue.
In the halcyon days of startups, it was possible to find an angel investor willing to seed an unknown team with a great vision. These days investors are more conservative - partially due to the current financial conditions, and partially because they have more experience. Investors prefer known quantities who have proven they have the ability to make a return on their investment. I most definitely am not a known entity, having never been involved in an exit of any kind in any meaningful capacity.
This means that I can’t just show up to a pitch meeting with a Powerpoint deck and some vague screenshots or mocked up videos of functionality. I’d have to show up with something that is functional that someone is already paying for. I’d have to prove that the idea itself is good, and I just need money to scale it up.
Finding and securing an investor is a full time job. From what I can gather over my years of experience, that’s what the CEO does. I think it’s basically a CEO’s entire job at a startup? I don’t have time to do that and build a prototype. Even if I did, it would certainly take me the bulk of that 44 days, and it wouldn’t even guarantee my mortgage. From what I understand, a funded startup is not a steady income.
Whilst finding and securing an investor for my "startup" isn't a viable goal in 44 days, what about going from a collection of code to revenue while searching for a job?
“Revenue” is such a loaded word in startups. If I tell you my startup has revenue, you don’t know if I’m 1% away from profit, or if I just made $1 this month. I could be hemorrhaging money on the back end with $50k monthly expenses, but as long as I charged a customer, I have revenue. It does sound nice to be able to say “my startup is earning revenue” even if I’m not making money.
Essentially, I want to spin up an idea from concept to revenue collecting MVP in 44 days. That seems challenging and within the realm of doable, and a reasonable enough way to spend downtime whilst looking for a job.
Day 1
I don't know if you've ever participated in a large, complex timed task (such as a hack-a-thon, or even an interstate move), but the key to success is a good plan. Which is what your first day (at least!) is for.
With only 44 days to develop a prototype, market it and get a paying user, I'm really going to have to push minimum-viable-product (MVP) to the limit. Common wisdom in the startup-sphere is that "if you build it, they won't come" - marketing is where most of my effort should go.
By that logic, I should probably loosely time-box tasks in the following order:
1. Set up landing site with user funnel + payment capture + basic mailing list - 5 days
2. Find appropriate online spaces to start content marketing - 1 day
3. Write 5 pieces of content marketing to pitch MVP - 2.5 days
4. Drip content out to mailing list, online spaces, LinkedIn - 0 days (interspersed with other tasks, 30 mins per day tops)
5. Build MVP + deploy somewhere public - 5 days
6. Write 5 pieces of content marketing to pitch MVP based on feedback from first 5 - 3 days
7. Drip content out to mailing list, online spaces, LinkedIn - 0 days
At this point, I'll need to evaluate where I am and make decisions later. I can't plan further out because the strategy may change, and the tactics definitely will.
Basic math will tell you that I've only planned 16.5 days of work which leaves 27.5 days unaccounted for. Way to plan, ding dong!
Firstly, this 44 days is really 33 days - I'm not planning on working weekends. I'm married and trying to maintain good mental health through this whole process - working every waking hour would be counterproductive. Instead, if I treat this as a 9-5 job I'll have a much healthier relationship with this whole event in my life.
Secondly, I’m also trying to treat finding a job as a 9-5 as well. I can't lose sight of the primary goal - securing income to save our real-estate transaction. I need to account for the time spent tweaking my CV, communicating, interviewing and doing take home tests. So really that 33 days is actually 16.5 days - I should be spending at least half of my time trying to get a job.
Thirdly, as the eponymous Mike Tyson once said, "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face" - this plan is already wrong. I know it going in. So my estimated 16.5 days of work will actually take longer than 16.5 days.
I've already blown my plan. Way to plan, ding dong! At least 16.5 days of work, probably more, in 16.5 days of equivalent work. The plan will fail before it starts, so what value is it?
Believe it or not, this is a good plan. A great plan would have additional slack for the inevitable expansion of 16.5 days work into who knows how much work - probably 50% more time in slack. But this plan is:
honest - it realistically accounts for other things that are happening in life.
realistic - 60% of the time is spent building things, 40% of the time is marketing. 50% of the build time is building marketing things.
usable - it captures the priority list and a fuzzy feel for how long something should take. I'll use this to guide my building and writing processes.
The thing about trying to do anything ambitious against a time limit is that time is always the limiting component. This whole goal and plan is full of unknowns, and unknowns are risk to time, which is our limiting component. Everything is going to be sacrificed at the altar of time - functionality, code quality, testing - including the plan.
A bad plan would use all 44 days as if they were usable, when they aren't. It wouldn't give me a break. It would spend too much time writing code too early. Programmers love writing code, and typically hate talking to non-techies, and wouldn't be too cut up if the plan slipped and marketing fell off even if it meant failure.
A bad plan would be overly detailed and rigid - if I had decided to treat this as a scrum epic, and break it down into 8 five day sprints, written stories and scheduled everything - that's a lot of work spent working on something that's wrong. If we need to spend time on something that's wrong (and we do), don't spend a lot of time on it.
Time to get started.
Not actually last Thursday, I’m posting these after the fact. I still don’t have a job and the real-estate deal is still at risk!
Except for a very outdated Crunchbase profile