The Passion Project - Time to do what you love

Will Demaine at UXDX Community: Ireland & UK. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RS4gZm8yAg

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

The idea: easier alerting for engineers

[00:00:00] Host: Next we have Will, who is not going to talk about his day job. He's actually going to talk about his secondary job, or his passion project. We're going to be digging into this because a lot of people like to understand what the startup life is like, so we're just going to dig into an example here with Will and find out about his passion project. Welcome, Will.

[00:00:27] Will: Hi, how are you doing? Thanks for having me.

[00:00:28] Host: Great. First off, just introduce us. Give us the elevator pitch for your idea.

[00:00:35] Will: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe first who I am; that'll help give a little bit of context if people don't know. I currently work as a staff engineer at Monzo for my full-time job, like you already mentioned, and I used to work at other tech companies as well, Expensify [?], Uber, that kind of thing. But what I'm doing right now is starting to build another product. I'm building a tool that aims to help engineers, or anyone really in the company, create, manage and maintain the alerts that they want a little bit more easily than currently happens.

[00:01:15] Will: If you're not familiar with alerts, they're basically fire alarms for your software. You need to know when things are broken, when things are going wrong. Usually it's an engineer that gets called, maybe in the middle of the night. The way that those things are configured and set up right now can be a little bit painful, depending on some of the tools that people are using. So my idea is a product to help make that a little bit smoother for people and manage those things a little bit more easily.

[00:01:42] Host: Great. Is this a big problem for people? Because for years there have been alerts, there have been people getting the phone call in the middle of the night. How big a problem is this, actually?

[00:01:55] Will: It's a good question. I think the tooling around this stuff is always evolving, and the driving factor behind me thinking about this now is that certain technologies are evolving as well and becoming very popular. There are new metric systems coming into play that are growing really rapidly and becoming the de facto standard, but the tooling for them is lagging a little bit behind the growth that they're experiencing. Tooling exists for other products already that maybe does a similar kind of thing, but a lot of people are still finding the pain here.

[00:02:39] Will: The question of how big a problem or how big an idea it is, is an interesting one. I'm not necessarily shooting for the next unicorn, billion-dollar company. Crazy respect for people that go and do that, but the odds are significantly stacked against you. I'm trying to find a bit of a niche. I do think it could be a multi-million dollar company if things worked out. But you don't always have to shoot for the moon. It's okay to build something that's iterative and additive, that adds some value and that people are willing to pay for, and then that can be a great project or a great company at the end.

Where the idea came from

[00:03:27] Host: Great. I like that framing of it, that, as you were saying, it doesn't need to be the biggest thing. So where did this idea come from? Is this your first idea, or have you had 10 before? Why have you chosen this as the one you're going to get behind?

[00:03:44] Will: It's a good question. Probably like everyone that's looking to do something, I've had a hundred before, but I never did anything about them. I subscribe to a saying from Marc Randolph, the co-founder of Netflix: every idea is a bad idea, and it's really just execution and iteration that matter. That's what develops every idea into something meaningful, and maybe 90% of those will end up not going anywhere, and then you iterate. The idea on its own is probably not worth much; it's doing something with it.

[00:04:24] Will: Why do I think that this is something that might be able to get past that first barrier, when it's just an idea? The way that I've been looking at it is: what do you already know? I'm an engineer. I work every day as an engineer in a company. I need to write alerts for the systems that I'm building internally, and our team does, and every other team at Monzo does, for example, and at many other companies. Every time you go through that, you feel some pain where the tooling isn't quite right. Picking an idea that you know inside out, where you go through the pain every day, gives you obviously a good perspective on what you might be able to solve, and where you might be able to make things better for other people, assuming that they're going through the pain. That's a big assumption to make.

[00:05:18] Will: But there are some ways to get some extra validation. This is also a problem that I've seen at other, bigger companies like Uber. By the time Uber got up to hundreds or thousands of engineers, this was a problem that Uber solved internally. Someone else took this problem on, for Uber-specific technologies, so it isn't necessarily replicable across everyone else by default. There's no open source thing, for example, that does this. But it was a need that they had, they solved it, and the product was a good one. It's an incredibly valuable thing to know that somebody has done this before and it works for them. If you can see a product at your own company internally that has helped your company do something really, really well, then you've got one of the key first pieces of validation to say, well, maybe I can take that to everyone else.

[00:06:15] Will: Those two things combined, knowing the problem and feeling the pain myself daily, or maybe weekly, and then seeing that this has worked somewhere before, lead me to think that this might be a good idea. But who knows? I'm perfectly willing to turn around in a few months and say, actually, this wasn't going to work for me, and it might not work for the people either.

[00:06:36] Host: I like that attitude, because it reminds me of Segment. I can't remember what they were originally doing, but they had this annoying problem of having to consolidate lots of data into one thing and then pump it out everywhere else. They released this as open source or something, and it got a hell of a lot of traction. As their main idea was failing, they were like, well, obviously this is a pain point, so they just turned that into their business and got bought out for a couple of billion.

[00:07:05] Will: Yeah, it's incredible when it happens. Slack were a gaming company, trying to build a game, and then they said, oh, we need a better way for us to talk to each other internally, and they ended up with Slack, and obviously we all know the story from there. I think it's a really important thing to realize, if you're going to do something like this, that the idea you start with is probably not the idea you're going to finish with. But pivoting is really tricky as well. Knowing what to build is 90% of the problem, in my eyes. That's what I struggle with, anyway. So being open to going, you know what, maybe this needs to change, it's not working, let's try something else, is a really good mindset to have, I think. But it's tough.

Why do it: financial independence

[00:07:50] Host: Great. We've talked a lot about the product, and I'd love to get a bit more, as you were saying there, into the motivations. Why are you doing this? What's the ultimate goal?

[00:08:03] Will: That's a good question. The ultimate goal for me, to be candid, is to achieve financial independence. I stopped to think a little bit about it. I've been working as an engineer for 10 years or so, and I thought, okay, if I want to achieve true financial independence, what's the best way to do that? Is it to join a startup early, grow with the startup, do really well and get shares or whatever? But then you've got to pick the startup, and it's not easy. Most startups, unfortunately, are doomed to fail, so it's a question of whether you can get lucky.

[00:08:50] Will: If you don't want to rely on the luck of picking a startup, then what are your other options? You can grind out a salary, which is completely fine. There's no problem with that, and it's something I've actually been doing for a long time. But are you ever going to get to the point where you can maybe be mortgage-free or completely debt-free and live completely financially independently? Possible, but it might take you a very long time. So I want to take a little bit more of a risk and ask, can I achieve that in maybe the next five years? It looks to me like owning something is the high risk, high reward way of possibly getting there.

[00:09:33] Will: That's what motivates me to do it. I'm not motivated by money. I don't care about cars and watches and clothes and whatever. I don't think I own anything that's worth more than a thousand pounds. It's not about the material stuff; it's just about the independence for me. So that's why I'm doing it.

[00:09:57] Host: You obviously haven't gotten into the bicycle craze. I'd be similar. My fashion is definitely not expensive, but my bicycle, unfortunately, costs a bit.

[00:10:06] Will: Actually, I lied. I have a camera that cost me two thousand pounds, but I think that's the most expensive thing.

Why now, and de-risking the leap

[00:10:13] Host: So that's your underlying motivation. Was there anything about the pandemic that triggered it? Why now?

[00:10:23] Will: Yeah, definitely. That did play a big part in it. Like for a lot of people, it gave everyone a chance to stop and take a minute, look back at what they've been doing and think about where they want to go. For me it was a house move, changing circumstances with my wife and everything. We moved out of London, and it gave me a chance to think, okay, what am I actually wanting to achieve?

[00:10:58] Will: I think the biggest underlying factor for me was just: if not now, then when? That was the question I was asking myself and talking to my wife about. If I wasn't going to do it now, when would I do it? Later, would we have kids? Would we have other responsibilities? Would we be somewhere else in the world? If the answer is yes to any of those, then maybe taking this project on wouldn't work. So that was really it: why not do it?

[00:11:35] Will: Obviously, taking a leap here was sometimes hard for me, and I'm sure it's hard for a lot of people. It's hard to leave behind the salary, or some security, to take the risk to do something like this. But you have to weigh it up in different ways, and maybe we can talk about this as well: there are different ways of de-risking it, and different ways to think about taking different risks. For me, I'm actually working two days a week with Monzo still, and three days a week full time on my own project. That's my way of de-risking it a little bit.

[00:12:23] Will: There are obviously other ways to de-risk as well. But something that Tom Blomfield, the founder of Monzo, says, I've heard him say it a few times, and I totally believe it, is that most people can take more risks than they think. For a lot of people in the industry, maybe you have some savings or you have something to fall back on. It's a privileged position to be in, I definitely understand that: being able to say, well, if this doesn't work, it doesn't matter, I'll do something else, or I'll have family there to help me, or whatever it is. But if you are in that position, it's good to understand that you're in that position, and then you can leverage it. What's the worst that can happen? If you think of it that way, then maybe you're more likely to take on more than you think you can.

[00:13:19] Host: I think that's a great way of looking at it. And the other way that I think about it is a product-like iterative approach. It'll always be like this until you start and start encountering and figuring out how to solve the problems. That's the only way that you can actually go. You have to start, hit the roadblocks and figure out what to do, because if you try to plan it all out ahead of time, it's just not going to work. It's good that you're open to your idea changing, because most likely it will in certain ways.

[00:13:52] Will: Absolutely, and that's something I'm already considering. I'm at the point where I've not even launched it, and I'm like, actually, maybe this isn't quite what I wanted it to be, or maybe the thing I was envisioning is a bit too big, and I want to focus on some specific area after talking to people and getting a little bit of feedback. That's probably already happening, hopefully for the better.

Using Monzo as the first customer

[00:14:17] Will: An interesting part of that as well is the reason I'm still part-time at Monzo. To me, that is probably the best avenue for getting feedback that I'll ever have. This is a product that would be a useful thing for Monzo. If this product existed today, and you could just go out and buy it off the shelf from somebody else, then Monzo would probably have bought it, and they would be using it. When you're in that situation, where it's a tool that the company you're working at might already want to use, then you might have the potential to say: look, I'm going to build this thing, but why don't you help me by using it early? You get the value from it while it's something you can't currently buy, and at the same time I'm going to learn a lot from it, which will hopefully shape the product in a good way.

[00:15:13] Will: If you're taking that challenge on yourself, without the support of a company, which many people do, then the hardest part is knowing what to build and going and talking to the customers. You have to build something, sell it to people, maybe give it away for free initially, go and talk to five customers, get them using it, and then you start that iterative cycle of improvements. That's by far the best way to go from an idea to something that's actually useful. And if you can do that within a company you already work at, you've got a shortcut.

[00:15:49] Will: There's absolutely no way that, if I didn't work at Monzo and they didn't know who I was, I'd be able to test a product internally at that company without going through all the security, compliance and onboarding stuff that every supplier goes through. It's a regulated industry; you have to jump through all of these hoops. And I don't mean just jumping through hoops; they're there for a reason. But there are lots of things that you have to do to prove that you have certain compliance. If you work there and they know you, maybe there are some ways you can work around that stuff, like: let's run it in a test environment, and let's not touch any production data. And you don't have to go through particular onboarding stuff, because it could be hosted within the company's infrastructure, or something like that. So there are ways to leverage that for research for yourself, and that's a massive leg up compared to being completely out there on your own, fighting for people to try it.

[00:16:48] Host: How did you negotiate that with your boss? I'm assuming if you said, "I'm building a bank," they probably wouldn't have been too happy. So how did you negotiate it?

[00:17:00] Will: This is a good question. Step one is having a good relationship with your bosses, or the people who run the company at the highest levels, if possible. If you come out of nowhere, maybe you've never spoken to them before, and all of a sudden you say, "Hey, I want to build this thing," is it going to work? I'm not sure. Having that relationship and awareness is probably quite an important thing.

[00:17:32] Will: After that, I should give a lot of credit to Jonas, who's the CTO of Monzo, who I spoke to the most about this idea. I think he's very keen to see people who have been part of the Monzo family go and succeed and do their own things. I don't want to quote him here, but to paraphrase, it was something like: the best reason somebody could leave Monzo is to go and build their own thing, and not because they don't like working at Monzo or want to work somewhere else where they think it's going to be better. If it's one of those reasons, then maybe Monzo's not done everything they can. But if it's, "I'm not going to work at another company, I just want to do my own thing," then that's a hard thing to stop people doing, and you probably don't want to stop people doing it, because they want to do it. So his perspective on it was: how can we help you succeed, rather than how can we stop you doing it? And if helping me succeed meant Monzo losing some of my time, that was something that he was willing to go for, thankfully.

[00:18:45] Will: I don't know if that's a common case. People seem to care a lot about people at Monzo, which is one of the reasons I'm there in the first place, and I can imagine there'd be many bosses who wouldn't take the same stance. But thankfully for me, that's how I went about it. And it's always worth having the conversation, even if you think there's no chance. It's a similar story to negotiating when you're joining a company. Companies offer you some salary and some benefits and whatever it is, but absolutely everything is negotiable. People think that you can't change it, that you can't say, "Hey, I want this laptop, or this home office, or to move to this country," or whatever it is. Everything's negotiable when you're doing that; it's just a matter of asking the question. If you never ask the question and you just sign the papers that are there, then it's never going to happen for you. So it's a little bit "don't ask, don't get," and it's also just knowing the people and having that relationship.

[00:19:53] Host: Yeah, and it's a delicate balance when you don't have the relationship yet, if you're just starting the job. But it's definitely something that I've experienced: once you're in the job and you've established yourself, you can go back and negotiate a lot of things.

[00:20:07] Will: Yeah, absolutely. Would it work if you'd been there for six months? I doubt it. If you've been there for a longer time, or you're known to be effective as a person in that company, then it's probably more likely to happen for you.

The team and how to fund it

[00:20:26] Host: Great. You've talked about the challenges along the way in terms of the product: you said you think you're building too big and you might pivot it a little bit. What about the team? Who is the team, and any challenges in building the team?

[00:20:42] Will: The team is me, right now. But that's something I'm thinking about. There's always a trade-off: how fast do you want to go, how fast do you want to build? There's no doubt that with a team of a few people, you could probably accelerate by some high multiple of getting stuff done. But then you've got to figure out how you get those people. Either you convince people to do what you're doing and work for nothing, or maybe not nothing, but a share in the company, shares that are worth nothing on paper. Or you pay them, and then you've got to figure out where you're going to pay them from. Can I bankroll it myself? Do I have those savings? Unlikely. Do you have to go and raise money for it? If you go and raise money, then you have investors who you need to deliver results to. You're taking someone else's money, so you have to do something good with it. You have a duty to.

[00:21:49] Will: That's the balance. Do you take money, hire five people and speed everything up? Or do you try to do it on your own for a little bit and see where it goes? It is definitely a tricky thing to balance, and I'm still trying to figure that out myself. So right now the team is me. I'm sorry, I forgot what the rest of the question was.

[00:22:09] Host: Well, yeah, it was around that. But it's an interesting point around the funding model, because what I'm seeing a lot with VCs now is that there are almost two different VC funding models. Tiger Global are becoming very famous in the industry for just handing over money, walking away and not being very hands-on, whereas a lot of other VCs would argue that the money is actually only half the value. The money gets you halfway, but the contacts and the advice and the other bits are the other half of the value. Have you looked into that, or what's your opinion on it?

[00:22:51] Will: I have. I think every product needs two things: you need the product to be good, and you need distribution. Distribution is not something I'm particularly good at. I don't have, let's say, a big Twitter presence, and I'm not in big engineering communities in such a way that I can easily reach lots of people with a product that I'm launching, for example. So that would be something I would look to leverage if I was going to raise money. For me, that network, the things that VCs might be able to bring to the table, is probably more valuable than it might be for somebody who is really good at distribution. They might not need that help; they might just need cash to pay for salaries, for example. So that's something I keep in mind when I'm thinking about how I'm going to do this: what could I get from them, and how would they help me the most? That's probably why I would lean towards doing that.

[00:23:50] Will: But there are other ways. It's not necessarily just VCs. If you're looking for a good distribution network to test things out, especially for early products, there are plenty of startup accelerators. Something I'm considering is Y Combinator or other similar things. Basically their whole thing is: do we like the person? We'll take a small gamble on them. They pay something like, I think it's 120,000, and they take seven percent of the company. They're basically just funding your living costs for six months or a year, whatever it is; if you live in San Francisco, probably three months. And then they put you in touch with everyone, because there are something like a thousand companies that go through YC every week or whatever now. So you have a base to start with, you have people willing to try your product early, and you have a good way to get that initial distribution.

[00:24:47] Will: When you're just starting out, you don't need more than five companies to talk to, to learn that your product sucks or that it is great. You only need a handful of people. So that's another avenue to get that, before you move to the next stages, where you might need more distribution in terms of sales or whatever it is. There are plenty of options. For me, I'm trying to figure out when the right time is to start to leverage those things. I'm leaning towards going down an accelerator route if possible. But I also want to feel like I'm going into that with a product that I want to be committed to myself. I'd like to get feedback initially from a few people, ideally Monzo and maybe a few others, and see: is this really something that I want to commit the next few years of my life to, or could it even pivot into something else before going down that route? That's why I'm holding off a little bit on that right now.

Building a company without the grind

[00:25:49] Host: It's great to see the thinking that goes on behind this. And it leads, as you were saying, to the real motivation: is this something that I'm happy to devote so much of my life to? Because startups are never easy. There's always going to be hard work, and that comes back to your original motivation. You want the financial independence, but do you want it so that you have more free time? Is that the ultimate goal? Because then are you countering your goal by starting a startup?

[00:26:21] Will: Yeah, exactly. It's an interesting question. For a lot of people, startups can be a big grind, where you put years and years into something, and then maybe it takes off and maybe it doesn't. I don't know if it has to be that way. Maybe there's something about the kind of people that are successful in that business, especially tech startups, where they're the kind of people who will dedicate everything to the company, and they'll put the other parts of their life on hold, or maybe not on hold, but maybe not devote the same amount of time as they would to, let's say, family or other commitments.

[00:27:10] Will: I don't know if it has to be that way. I think it's probably possible to build a company without saying, "I'm not going to see my family for years, and I'm going to be awake all night doing things all the time." I hope it's possible to do it that way; that's probably my aim. I'm looking at it as a full-time job. There'll be more commitments in some facets. I'll probably be on call for the alerts that I need for my own company. Let's say something's broken: who's going to fix it if it's the middle of the night and you have customers in America using it, and you're a small team or just you? It's going to be you. So maybe you're going from doing an on-call shift at Monzo once every six weeks with your team, to being on call every day, forever, for years. That's probably a sacrifice that you're going to have to take.

[00:28:12] Will: But does it mean you have to work beyond six o'clock, or whatever it is, and never see your family? Not necessarily. I don't think that's a particularly healthy way of doing it. So my aim is to do it that way. Maybe I'll live to regret that. Or maybe I won't have to regret it; even if it doesn't work, I'll still have done what I wanted to do and spent time with them and whatever else. I think time in the day is the motivator, so don't give it up for no reason.

[00:28:42] Host: The poster child for that model in the past was Basecamp, because they advocated the nine to five approach. The past year hasn't been so kind to the company, but I still think it's a good one to emulate if you can. Honestly, I struggle with it. I'd love to spend less time on the startup, but unfortunately there are always things to be done.

Future plans: finding traction

[00:29:06] Host: So what are your future plans? What are your hopes for the startup?

[00:29:10] Will: Well, obviously to achieve my goal. But I think the plan is to try to get some traction. The hardest thing right now for me is that I sit in my office at home, on my own, with a whiteboard and a computer, for three days a week, and go, "God, what am I going to build?" No, I don't just sit there the whole time worrying about that. Actually, you've got to try. It's like trying to write a book. You can sit staring at a blank page for a week, or you can just start writing and then fix it later. My approach is to just start building something, and then you can make it good afterwards.

[00:29:55] Will: That's the thing I struggle with the most: what should I build, and when? Which features matter, which don't? What I'd like to achieve in the short term is a cohesive set of features that I think adds a decent amount of value, and then just start getting that out into people's hands and start to see some traction.

[00:30:14] Will: You see different companies go through this. If you ever watch Dragons' Den or something, you get people who come in, and the investors are like, "I'm not going to invest, because this might be a good business for you, but it's never going to be huge," and they're only going to invest if it's going to be huge. Well, that doesn't mean it's a failure. If it's a good business for you, maybe it can be a company that sustains three people's salaries and generates more money than you would get paid as a salary if you worked for a company. It doesn't mean it's a failure. As I said before, for people that are shooting for the next Google or Uber or whatever it is, the odds are stacked against them. Some of them go for it, and that's great, but it doesn't have to be the goal.

[00:31:06] Will: Obviously I'd like to have a situation where things just snowball, everyone wants it, people are throwing money at you to use this product, and it grows amazingly. But the likelihood is it's a slow grind, and if you can get to the point where you're generating some revenue, that's an amazing start. So my aim in probably the next three to six months is to really decide: is this the idea that I'm going to carry on with, and can it start generating some revenue and some interest, or should I move on to something else? That's the immediate goal.

[00:31:40] Host: Excellent, that was really interesting. I'm sure some of the people listening might be screaming about doing some UX processes to try to focus on where to start building.

[00:31:50] Will: Absolutely, and I am doing that as well. I have a couple of really good product design and design people who I've been talking with a little bit, who I've worked with in the past, helping me out to figure out where the value really comes from and what makes sense as a product. But it's tricky.

[00:32:09] Host: It's a huge problem for everybody. It is very difficult: what's the smallest set that adds value? But yeah, I wish you the very best. It was a really good conversation, and I hope for every success for the business.

[00:32:23] Will: Thank you very much, I appreciate it. Thank you.