The real enemy is building things that don't matter
Scott Berkun and I are writing a book on "Why Design is Hard". To keep up with our progress, sign-up here.
I joined the staff of Startup Weekend in early 2014 because I just spent 3 years building something that didn't matter in that "pay the mortgage in Seattle" kind of way.
Around 2006, I'd become known as a resident video nerd around the Seattle geek community. I was showing up at geek gatherings with my MiniDV camcorder and saying, "This looks like a cool session. Mind if I help you get video of it on the internet? Have you heard of this thing called YouTube?"
One thing led to another and, I decided in 2011 to make a go of turning my video work into a streaming video business called Bootstrapper Studios.
I thought affordable and nimble HD broadcast gear could create more and content, which could be monetized via social data from live events. And I was right, as smartphone video, Twitter, Facebook and TikTok would prove.
And while we had a lot of fun and did some incredible work, there was barely enough cashflow to pay the mortgage and keep our core team and contractors employed.
I had made the mistake of building something that, while valuable, was not valuable enough to be sustainable.
I had met Marc Nager at Gnomedex 2010 when he had just taken over and started to scale a geek event called Startup Weekend. It's an experiential learning event that teaches product development basics to anyone who wants to learn how to build products that matter.
When I decided to fire myself in 2014 to give my company a better chance of surviving without my payroll burden, Marc was the first person I called.
I had a deep desire to help people around the world avoid the "building things that don't matter enough to pay the mortgage" mistakes I had made.
I joined in February 2014, and helped Startup Weekend scale further across the globe by building events and communities dedicated to doing that.
When I re-entered enterprise tech in 2017, I noticed that the biggest value I could add was helping product + design + engineering teams collaborate to avoid the same "don't matter" pitfalls.
Whether we are product managers, researchers, designers, engineers, marketers, or the like, I believe we all have natural dead spots that limit our ability to see things as they really are. And these dead spots lead us to work on things that don't matter.
In tandem – our disciplines and diversities, along with great frameworks, enable us to help one another see beyond these dead zones, so that our work has a much higher chance of making an impact.
With these kinds of smarter approaches, let's stop wasting our short precious lives on building things that don't matter.