Shipuary 2025

I’m either late to shipmas or early to the shipuary trend. Yes, shipuary, a new thing I just made up¹.

The objective is simple: ship 3 products by the end of the month of February.

The purpose is simple: to build and ship things fast → to get real feedback fast.

The goal is a combination of the following:

• turn my growing list of ideas into real products through more pressured action
• progress towards my 2025 goal of generating $1000 in revenue
• build products that make many people smile

The problem I have is that I love talking about ideas, products, businesses and don’t do enough to make them real. The steps I made in 2024 is concrete progress to solving that problem. But I know I can do more.

I loved tuning into 12 Days of OpenAI (a play on shipmas), so why not have a little fun of my own.

Here are the rules:

1. three new products must be in a production environment by 11:59PM CST on February 28th, 2025
2. each product must meet a single minimum requirement to be considered ‘done’

The single requirements are:

1. Grade Final Boss
   1. User can sign in to view their saved final grade calculation
2. Chicago Transit Tracker
   1. User can see train arrival times at all CTA train stops
3. Garpple
   1. User can view weekly minutes spent in zone 2 for the past 3 months

I’ll learn a lot between now and the end of the month. In the days spent passively thinking² about this challenge, I came up with some thoughts on...

1. how does one pick an idea?

   • Pick something you would love to sell. Like the thought of you going around and telling everyone about the product is exciting, feels natural. You can believe in an idea, but not want to make the product. (e.g. I think upwardly would do a lot of good, has good intentions, and social accountability in consumer apps make things work and I believe in in the benefits of getting up early, but I wouldn’t want to sell anyone on it. Versus a clean, modern, minimalist, bad-ass chicago transit tracker app? hell yeah.

2. what will help me succeed?

   • Getting narrow, staying narrow
   • Defining a single ‘done’ requirement

3. how will i do it?

   • Intuition building. I have good intuition and I am a user of all my potential ideas. Just build it. Don’t have time to fully research everything³ anyways. I can research after (i.e. get real user feedback aka the better research⁴)

4. what will the products look like?

   • Black and white everything. Color for results/outcomes or key actions only.
   • Few buttons. I’m smart enough to know what matters.

5. what are some product principles I want to keep in mind - for shipuary and beyond?

   3 Product Principles⁵ of dkBuilds

   1. It works as you expect it to
      1. functional and delivers on the promise being sold
   2. It’s beautiful
      1. beauty in simplicity
   3. It’s fun
      1. you want to use it and tell others about it

6. how will I sell the products?

   • Only sell 1 thing. or else you divide customers attention and risk confusing them.
   • The ad must speak for itself. You can’t sit there and explain the product to the customer.

7. and addressing concerns that I’m wasting my time?

   • No one wants to waste time building something that isn’t valuable. So you can either:

     (1) get feedback on the idea (no product built)

     (2) get feedback on the actual product and if you’re gonna do (2), you must move fast. Thats the purpose of shipuary.

Every art form has tension before creation. Fuck it.

See ya Mar 1 ✌️