I said it somewhere else, but really planning ahead is really important. When I sat down with the concept of Fix It Today, it seemed simple. People put up with schedules and homeowners can find it. We started in December of 2023 and having some software development experience (well, paying for it and watching software come together), I felt like we could have a MVP (minimum viable product) done in 2-3 months. I learned from the Amazon software, we should really build a MVP and test it to make sure there is product market fit before we really dive into it. Well, that didn’t go to plan.
So 2-3 months…Its doable. We just need something simple. Boy was I wrong. I should have listened to myself and told myself twice the time, twice the budget. We have some great friends that joined us as business partners. They run Fedex routes currently and are experts at getting stuff done. They are hard workers and just know how to execute a business. When them in tow, we started forging ahead and building. Twice the time…twice the budget. I have given that advice to other people I know…why didn’t it apply to me?
Well, as the title says, proper planning prevents piss poor performance. While I cant even come close to calling our development piss poor, what I can call piss poor was my underestimating the complexity. While Fix it Today’s MVP was supposed to be a schedule that is accessible by homeowners…the was much more in store for me. So many scenarios we had to work around, edge cases, unexpected detours. Adding up a calendar and some availability is much more complex than I would have guessed. And I though I had an educated guess.
When I plan ideas, I use Google Sheets. I just start writing down ideas and concepts. They are very unorganized but they are all in one place. Many nights I get out of bed in the middle of the night to write something down on this Google Sheet. Over 100 lines of “stuff” and there was just so much more I didn’t see ahead of time. This is where your team comes in. This is where third party people who helped validate your idea come in. They are essential to the success of the project.
We overlooked quite a few major things initially thinking too small. We were just building an MVP so I’d like to give myself an excuse but when it comes down to it, I should have spent more time planning and organizing. I think consulting those validators initially would have saved a couple weeks of development. So what did we overlook? We initially wanted to group employees availability and present the overall availability to the homeowner…but thats now it really works. Just because one person is available doesn’t mean thats the right employee for the job. We overlooked the fact that some companies have multiple trades in their business. My #1 company close to me who helped me the most runs HVAC and plumbing. When a HVAC tech is available, that doesn’t mean a plumbing one is. We overlooked business hours, emergency or after hours services, we missed lots of things. Could we have planned for them all up front? No, absolutely not. If we spend a little more time planning could have been up and running faster? Yes.
