016 • What I learned when building a digital product

Welcome back…

I was struggling with ideas this week. I like to share with you some of the things I’ve been doing in my life in this newsletter but the truth is I haven’t been doing much recently.

Except for building a digital product, that is.

So I suppose I’ll write about that.

I’d made a couple of free lead magnets using Craft Docs before, but nothing like my new project PARAZETTEL.

It’s a demo vault for Obsidian that includes videos, source notes and guides that explain exactly how to use the vault to juggle content creation amongst other projects that you might have.

I’m launching next week but before I can release it to the masses, there are a lot of things that have to go on behind the scenes.

So here are a couple of lessons that I’ve learned from the building process (they apply to general productivity and writing too):

Allow some time between writing and editing

I’ll be honest…

This is something I’m really bad at. I’m writing this newsletter right now, with the intention of sending it out in a couple of hours.

I won’t check it over again before it’s sent because I have another broadcast to write and some other emails to follow up on.

However, when building PARAZETTEL, I did have the privilege of coming back to the content in the vault days after it had been written.

Let’s just say it required some work.

I’ve heard that there are two different hats you need to wear as a writer. One for vomiting everything you think of onto the page and another for going back through what you’ve written and turning it into something vaguely coherent.

In other words, a writing hat and an editing hat.

It requires a context switch to change between the two. You have to go from thinking divergently to thinking convergently, which in essence are complete opposites, even though we’re expected to do both.

There’s nothing better to help this context switch than to put time in between the period of writing and the period of editing.

How much time? As much as you can afford. Twenty minutes is better than editing as you write. It’s ideal if you can write the work the day before and then edit it the following day. Beyond this, the increase in the benefit of leaving the editing longer just tails off. We have to keep things moving.

This brings me to my next lesson…

Focus on the basics

I’ve never made a product like PARAZETTEL before.

Despite this, my mind was full of lofty ambitions to create something magical that was going to surpass all other alternatives, with a subscription-based community, personalised videos to all customers, regular updates…and…I’ve never made a product like PARAZETTEL before.

So I realised I had to forget these features, reign in my ego and, first and foremost, make the actual demo vault as valuable as I possibly could.

A useful rule for this is using the 80/20 rule or the Pareto Principle. I talked about this in a previous issue in more detail but, in short, it suggests focusing on the 20% of activities that you can do that will provide 80% of the output.

For PARAZETTEL this is simply to make sure the product is as good as possible, that there’s an effective funnel in place for when I launch and that nothing goes hideously wrong.

Perhaps one day I’ll include all the features it would be nice but not essential to have. But not right now.

I’m attacking the project step-by-step at the moment, with a very prioritised viewpoint. You should approach all projects like this if you want the most ‘bang for your buck’ on effort invested into your work.

That’s it for this issue. Next week will most likely be all about the launch of the product, but I’ll weave some valuable insights in too.

Cheers.