Today I read an awesome blog post from an entrepeneur who decided that rather than invest his money into some high risk angel-round companies, he could invest in himself. This gave me a lot of ideas on how I want to approach this. I find that I struggle with the following questions:

• How much of an idea do I develop myself and how much do I outsource?
• How do I go about finding help?
• Do I bootstrap or ask for angels?
• How do I stay focused?

That blog post helped me get a more clear answer to questions 1 and 2, and these sort of self answer 3 and 4.

I live in perpetual insecurity that I am not using my degree, so I find that I overcompensate by constantly trying to reinvent the wheel. When I really think about it though, this games premise is my degree worth. I also have put in enough time into trying to develop a blockchain app myself that I understand enough of what needs to go into a DApp on the ethereum environment. I also work in the program/project management space and I’ve decided that part of my education is the ability to “figure it out” that comes from a baseline level of “technical-ness”. There was a time when the idea of intellectual honesty was the most important aspect of any project, but over time I definitely have relaxed a bit and am comfortable with not breaking my head trying to learn javascript overnight.

I think that my plan over the coming weeks is the following:

• Determine a business plan.

This should be concise and clear enough to pitch to both an investor and a friend. I wasn’t quite sure how to write this at first but luckily, SBA.gov is a phenomenal resource on how to structure one. My business plan for now will live somewhere in this blog until I get paranoid enough to take it down.

I found a template that I like on Overleaf and wrote up a Lean business plan. I don’t love the way it looks but this is an iterative process and things will get better.

• Write a Products Requirements Doc (PRD).

If I had a dollar for every time I told an interviewer that I’ve written a PRD, I probably wouldn’t need to make my startup. There is no time better than the present though so here we go. I got this idea from that great link from Ryan Shank that I posted earlier, thanks man!

A PRD is like the north star to a product manager. It describes exactly what a Product should offer when it is determined to be complete. This is a great and critical documentation that will help drive the day to day decisions as I march to the finish line.

Since I don’t actually know how to write a good PRD, I read a paper from the Silicon Valley Product Group to get an idea of how I should start. They give a phenomenal quote

The purpose of the product requirements document (PRD) or product spec is to clearly and unambiguously articulate the product’s purpose, features, functionality, and behavior.

This document goes on to describe the 10 steps to writing a great PRD. I took them to heart and am writing my PRD. This will probably take the rest of my night.