What I learned this week #2

Reflections

This week started to feel more like a “normal” week, as far as what you would expect if you were trying to launch a startup per week: it felt a bit more busy, hectic, overwhelming, but all in a positive, rewarding way. This being my second week, I am still in the honeymoon phase and everything has a high dose of novelty, but much less than last week. It feels good to be putting in the work, even though it’s hard. For example, yesterday I spent the entire day at my computer vibe coding 680 Club (see below). Vibe coding is a bit misleading, since you do have to sit, think, and focus your energy. Maybe it’s like meditation. It’s still hard, but rewarding. Anyway, after spending the day working, I had a sense of accomplishment that I lacked in my prior work. I think this is akin to developing purpose. Good things require effort, that is the law of Proof of Work.

Overall, I am getting much better at managing my time and checking in with myself. I don’t feel the need to control my time, as I did in my past life, I am just going with the flow and working on what seems most interesting and rewarding.

Weekly recap

I first approached the new week with the goal of making my process slightly better than last week. I just chose the product to work (680 Club) based on what was most obvious and needed. I already have some prepaid customers for this and lots of demand from potential customers. All I needed to do is just build the consumer version and release it. From there, I just need to grow it. This week, I stuck to my rule of only building something if I have 3 paying customers. I started off by making a plan for how I would approach the various tasks. This helped me get started and find efficiencies in the way that I planned out the work. For example, instead of building the app in 1 week, it took me around 3 days.

I also officially launched nobackspace.io! At some point I will get around to publishing it on the app store. I met with a UX Designer friend of mine whos a subscriber of this newsletter, he suggested that I make one small change to the app: give people 3 “free” backspace attempts so that they don’t get too frustrated with the disruptive nature of disabling the backspace key. This seems reasonable, but I’d like to know what you think or test it with actual users. As I write these words, I am currently at the Shut Up and Write meetup in Montreal, hoping to get some feedback from actual writers. My first observation is that most people are doing creative writing, which might not fit the use case of a browser-based digital notepad. I also noticed that most people write with pen and paper, and are very ritualistic about their writing. Breaking these rituals might prove to actually worsen the user experience more than it helps. Consider someone who has their writing setup optimized for “flow”, and tries nobackspace for the first time. It might be so different from their writing setup that they will not get value from the product and thus never become regular users. We will see.

I’m part of a telegram group called Vibe Coders that I came across on X. It’s basically a bunch of people in a group chat posting about vibe coding. Jack, the guy who put it together, launched a pretty cool product called Coherence. It’s a breathwork app that features different methods, slick UX, and reminder features. I started using it and really like it. My current process for guided breathwork is to just search stuff on YouTube and bookmark videos that I like. This is much better, since I have it on my phone and can access many different types of breathwork exercises. I just wish there were some background music that I could vibe to. Anyway, great work Jack! On Thursday, we had the first Vibe Coders townhall, where we all met up to get acquainted and discuss our various projects. There’s a lot of cool people in that group, you can access it here if you want to learn to vibe code or just hang out with us.

I also uploaded my first video to YouTube. I like the way the video flows and somehow puts together a somewhat of a story. Having watched the random videos I took and seeing it turn into this is amazing. Shout out to Jacob, the video editor I’ve been working with! I’m a layman in terms of video editing so I decided to work with an editor so I can maximize the time spent on building products, connecting with the audience, and all the other life stuff.

I went to an event in Montreal called Founder Poker, an founder-only meetup to play poker. What a great concept. How didn’t this exist before? It’s one of those ideas that seems so obvious in hindsight. Anyway, I had a great time and met a lot of cool people. I’m looking forward to going back and winning back my money from this round :D

Some of you may know that I help organize a meetup in Montreal called Product Therapy, a meetup for Product Managers to connect with peers and collaborate on work challenges. The concept behind the meetup is to have small groups and limit the attendees to PMs in the field. Rather than being open to all, these constraints keep the quality of the discussion high. The format is “bring-you-own-problem”: you write down the issue you’re having on a piece of paper, put it in a bowl, and then we draw at random. Each person’s paper gets drawn and they then have 10-12 mins to explain and discuss the issue in detail. As a result, the attendees get a really high-quality “panel of experts” to give solutions on their challenge. The meetup has been around since 2018, with the exception of COVID times, and is going strong. We now have a Toronto chapter, a Design Therapy Montreal meetup on it’s second meetup, and we are expanding to Founder Therapy Montreal. The concept is the same, just interchange [Product] Therapy with your field [Design, Founder, Engineering Management, etc…]. We now have a waiting list up for Founder Therapy Montreal and plan to have our first event in a month or two as we fill up the roster. In the long-term, the vision is to build a network of Peer Therapy meetups for all fields in all major tech hubs: Product/Founder/Design/Engineering Management Therapy in Toronto/Montreal/Vancouver/NYC/San Francisco/Austin. I might also do a podcast episode with Alex, the Founder of Product Therapy, to explain what it is, the history, the vision etc.

680 Club

The product

This week I decided to launch the B2C version of 680 Club, a credit building and education service for Canadian first-time homebuyers. You can checkout the demo app here, at some point it will just be on the 680club.com website. In Canada, you need a 680 Credit Score to get a mortgage with a “big 5” bank (RBC, TD, CIBC, BMO, Scotia) which offer the best rates. Technically, you can get a mortgage with a <680 score, but you can only access “B lenders” which are private lenders that typically charge around 2% more that the big 5. This works out to be ~$175,000 in interest over 25 years (assuming a $500,000 mortgage)! Compound interest is an incredible thing, but first make sure it’s compounding in your favour.

It’s never been harder for Canadian first-time homebuyers to access the housing market. Wages have not kept up with housing prices and for the first time in history, the current generation is worse off than the prior generation. This is a big deal. Buying a home is the primary savings vehicle for Canadians, it’s what underpins families and our retirement system. If a generation no longer has access to a long-term savings asset, then it has massive implications on family formation and retirement. This is shocking and highly concerning to me. Most millennials have completely given up on the prospect of owning a home and are becoming pessimistic on the “Canadian way of life”.

My goal in building the 680 Club is to help people get into the housing market in Canada.

The story

About 2 years ago, a friend of mine who always asks me about stocks showed me their credit score. To my surprise, it was a perfect 900. I was shocked. I couldn’t believe it. How was this possible? My curiosity was burning and I had to find out. So I spent a few random weekends over the next year or so reverse-engineering the credit scoring models used by Equifax and TransUnion (2 used in Canada). Once I knew how they worked, I asked myself: how do I make the number go up? The model is really just a function, you put numbers in and it transforms your data into a credit score which measures your likelihood to repay debts. Conveniently, I found a strategy that can optimize most people’s credit scores, so I tested it out on myself for 6 months. My credit score went from 699 to 805 in around 9 months just by using this strategy. Great! Altogether, it took me about 2 years to establish the feasibility of this strategy… This is an important prerequisite for this type of product. Feasibility in the product management world means “the technology behind the product is actually feasible and can be achieved”.

Then I thought: I wonder if I’m the only person who would benefit from this service? So I started asking around and seeing if people would like this service. I was able to find 3 customers to prepay for the service before I even built any of the code. I even tested it out with someone for free to confirm that the results I had were not a coincidence. Again, great! I now had a viable product to build. Viable in the product management world means “there is actual paying customer demand for this product”.

There’s a lot of debate on whether to start with feasibility or viability. I think it pretty much comes down to whether you’re trying to offer a differentiated product or innovating. If you’re just offering a competing product that already exists, but is just better, the main thing to focus on is viability. If you’re trying to innovate and build something that hasn’t existed before, then you should focus more on feasibility. It doesn’t matter how hungry the market is if the underlying technology doesn’t allow you to actually build the product. For example, it’s fair to say everyone would love a teleportation machine that would instantly teleport you to anywhere in the world. This would be a great thing for travel! But, the technology doesn’t exist right now, so it doesn’t really matter how many people want to teleport if it is not feasible/possible.

Now that I established both feasibility and viability, I went on to tackle usability. I decided to build the app using Bolt.new, an AI-assisted coding platform. As of this moment, the app is design-complete but there are still outstanding items to complete:

• finishing the stripe integration

• finishing the encryption

• testing, deploy, and release marketing

My plan for the rest of the week is to finish these items and update everyone here and on X.

The strategy

My strategy for growing is:

1. Focus on first-time homebuyers niche

2. Leverage affiliate marketing

3. Post my credit improvement journey live online

On #1: Credit building products are not new. There are plenty of other products out there. Just google “credit builder”. In my view, these products are very undifferentiated, there is nothing specifically for first-time homebuyers. So my approach was to design the app using completely different UI designs than my competitors and tailor the marketing for first-time homebuyers. For example, on the homepage I included:

• A typed-text animation that cycles through specific value propositions that resonate most with first-time homebuyers, and

• A calculator that lets users calculate their savings by getting “into the 680 Club”

And if we want to get technical, most of the other credit builders rely on some very funky strategies. Some are “rent reporting” services that let renters show rent payments to the credit bureau. The problem with that is that you also have to show the liability associated with your lease, which can also hurt your score. Overall, showing payment history is good but it can be offset by having a higher debt score associate with the lease liability. Many other credit builders use “micro loans” where they will “lend” you, for example, $50 where you have to repay $1 every month for 50 months… The goal here is to minimize the impact to the debt score while increasing your repayment score. My strategy works differently and doesn’t involve these weird loan structures…

On #2: I created an affiliate program for 680 Club targeted at personal finance influencers and financial professionals. My goal here is to develop a network of ambassadors for the product that align with the 680 Club vision and have already have clients/audiences that could benefit from this product. By providing them an affiliate program, we can align our incentives to help their customers: 680 Club gets new customers, their customers get an improved credit score, and they get a cut of whatever revenue we earn from offering the service. Since I don’t have an audience, this can be a great way to start and scale.

On #3: When my credit score hit 805, I stopped using the service and it has since come back down to the mid/high 600’s. I signed up as a customer of my own product and I plan to post my credit score update every month to let everyone see how my credit score improves over time. The goal here is to increase transparency and give people proof that this new product is worth trying.

What I’m reading and listening to

• The Art of Impossible, by Steven Kotler. Quick thoughts:

  • Worth the read. He is very structured and this is the kind of book you want to take notes and invest time into, not a sit back and chill type of book.

  • He makes the following distinction between Impossible and impossible (I vs. i). According to him, Impossible is more conceptual and represents things that just haven’t been done yet. impossible, on the other hand, is more about your personal self-limiting beliefs. Many things are impossible because we define ourselves in that way. “I’ll never be x”. His book explores how to get over impossible and into Impossible.

• JD Vance AI speech. Quick thoughts:

  • What a great speaker and fantastic speech. It’s been years since I heard something this good.

  • I like how he immediately caught the audience’s attention by reframing the discussion from “AI Safety” to “AI Opportunity”. This caught me by surprise.

• Macrovoices Jim Bianco “Mar-a-Lago Accord”. Quick thoughts:

  • Very interesting exploration of markets and the new world order around Trump 2.0 policies.

• Ray Dalio on Tucker Carlson. Quick thoughts:

  • If you don’t already know, Ray Dalio is a hedge fund manager who popularized our current understanding of how empires rise and fall in the macro finance community.

  • I have always found Ray’s writing and speaking style a bit cryptic, however I did get the message: we’re on a largely predetermined path due to centuries of economic momentum and human nature, and the outcome of that path really depends on how we resolve conflicts as individuals. If we opt to resolve conflicts with temperance and respect, then the outcome will be better overall vs. an adversarial, domineering, or absolute mindset.

• Half Baked Business Ideas newsletter. Quick thoughts:

  • Someone recommended this to me given my “startup per week” newsletter and I think it’s pretty cool.

  • If you want ideas of new startups to launch, this is a great place to look.

Things to come next week

Next week, I plan to:

1. Finish and launch 680 Club

2. Start and launch printboard.io, a print-on-demand vision board service

3. Continue optimizing my system to get faster/better

4. Keep the light with nobackspace.io, launch to the ios/play stores

Stay tuned!

Feel free to book me anytime with a 1-1 if you want to hangout or talk about ideas.