Product experiment #1: MyFavPeople

It’s time for the first product! I want to build a web app to help you remember your friends’ birthdays and their kids’ names. Basically, a simple CRM for your personal life.

I call it MyFavPeople, which is short for My Favorite People.

It’s coming straight from the idea matrix I outlined in My super secret spaghetti business plan. It didn’t score great (1 in profitability, 1 in demand, 2 in buildability, 2 in goodness, 3 in fun = 9 total), but I want to start building something so I don’t just end up blogging about not building anything. And I haven’t had an absolutely great idea yet. However, most of my ideas score highly in “fun”, which says a lot about my priorities in idea generation. :D

This is the first time I’m writing about a product before building (a prototype of) it, which is hopefully at least slightly entertaining and/or informative for you, and can help me concretize my thoughts about the product.

Let’s dig into some details. And because I’m not sure how to do this, I’ll dig into the idea matrix ratings.

Profitability §

Let’s be honest here, this probably isn’t going to make me rich. You could arguably just use your calendar and a note tool for the same, which is essentially free for anyone. But I believe someone might pay for convenience and a nice user experience. We’ll see, I have no idea!

Demand §

Totally going on my gut instincts here, but I think there could be demand for this. Several open source CRMs exist in the personal space as well, like Monica, but I’m going for something waaaay simpler.

I know I could use it, so that’s something!

Buildability §

I think this will be reasonably easy to build. (Famous last words, I know.) I’m going to be using my usual tech stack of a Go app, a SQLite database, and Postmark for my email provider. I think those are the main building blocks I need.

Goodness §

Giving this dimension a 2 is arguably a stretch, but it’s nice to remember your friends’ birthdays, right? :D And because their kids are not on Facebook yet, you’ll have to write it down somewhere, and you’ll get bonus points for remembering that little Gretchen has now indeed turned 2, and isn’t she cute when she’s throwing that tomato sauce on the floor again?

Fun §

I like building stuff. This sounds like a fun little app. I have a nice name for it, and Dall-E has been so kind to generate a nice logo for me, so… fun? Definitely! :D

Aaaand that’s it for now §

We’ll see how it goes. I’ll make sure to keep you updated!