Jibran’s Perspective

My buildspace project

For the next 6 weeks, I’m taking part in buildspace nights & weekends. It’s a cohort of people that participate in a 6-week long “school” where they work towards any idea they have. The goal is to launch a “product” by the end of these 6 weeks, and to gain as much traction as possible.

It also includes helpful sessions by people who’ve done this before. This isn’t an accelerator or an incubator though, it’s more like a forcing function to get you motivated to build and launch. The community provides the motivation, and the sessions provide useful knowledge you can apply towards the goal of the program; show your product on demo day at the end of the 6-week period.

Yesterday was the first session, the goal of which was to select an idea to work on. I keep a list of ideas that I want to work on, and from that, I found a few that I thought would be good candidates for n&w:

• An app to help send take home exercises for programmer interviews.
• Keep Your Tribe: A personal CRM that can help you keep in touch with the people you value in your life.
• Dubai schools list. I’ve been researching schools for my daughter and couldn’t find a single source of information that I really liked.
• A personal <> work calendar sync system. I’ve struggled with making sure that my personal calendar syncs (privately) to my work calendar, so stuff like school pickups, doctor appointments, etc. are blocked on my work cal.
• A GTD task management system in Notion. I’ve been personally using a system I created over a few weeks for the past 3 years (recently I switched to Things 3) and I found great value in my system for the 3 years that I used it for.

I originally wanted to build one of the SaaS like ideas from the list, but the Notion GTD idea immediately stuck out to me as something that I should do. It felt like the right size of project that I should take on, and felt like something I could do well.

But more importantly, it felt very uncomfortable selecting this project. I could feel my discomfort with this idea. Why?

I think the discomfort comes from how much potential there is for me to make this idea work in the limited time. With the other SaaS-based ideas, I could justify not launching or growing by building feature after feature.

With the Notion GTD system, I can’t do that. The system is already built; I’ve been using it for 3 years. I only need to package it up nicely for other people and then focus on selling. Which, I think, is what makes me uncomfortable. Sales is something I’ve never done, and it’s something I believe I’ll suck at.

Being bad at something is not a great feeling, which is why even though I immediately felt how great a fit the Notion GTD idea is for n&w, I very much wanted to avoid it.

So, that’s what I’m committing to. This feeling of discomfort is what pushed me to commit to this idea. I need to get over my fear, and learn how to sell. I can justify procrastinating on feature development with the other ideas, I can’t do that here.

This discomfort is good. It’s a sign of what I need to work on.

Let’s see how the next 6 weeks go.