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I\u2019ve been working on a few big projects recently, and became frustrated with the inertia built into launching anything big. Sometimes it seems like things will never be ready; like there\u2019s just too much to do.<\/p>\n

So I decided to take a break, and really challenge myself.<\/p>\n

The Challenge: Building a 0 \/ mo Product in A Day<\/h3>\n

For some reason, I\u2019m most motivated by absurd goals. Could I really find a market, pick a niche, and build a product in a single day? And what about marketing?<\/span><\/p>\n

I decided that a single day wouldn\u2019t afford any time for marketing, and so decided to just focus my efforts on finding a simple market inefficiency. That is, finding a pain point from within the web.<\/span><\/p>\n

Deciding to Build Something Small<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

I decided to build some sort of plugin for an Open Source web project. I\u2019ve noticed a real inefficiency here. All the good programmers are out there building the next Twitter, not making life easier for the businesses using Open Source software.<\/span><\/p>\n

But which Open Source web software? To find out, I pulled up Google Trends<\/a>, and searched for my potential targets:<\/p>\n

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As you can see, WordPress turns out to be the great big old winner. It simply gets searched for more often than my other two potential targets combined. And it\u2019s growing like crazy. <\/span><\/p>\n

A perfect market to search for inefficiencies.<\/span><\/p>\n

Total Time Spent Finding Market: 2 hours<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Narrowing It Down: Finding Unserved Pain Points<\/h3>\n

The most obvious market for WordPress is within Commercial themes. However, this market is pretty damn competitive, with multiple companies already established making 7 figure incomes. I decided building a complete theme and finding a place to market it in a single day was too obvious a path.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Seems WordPress plugins may be an interesting niche.<\/span><\/p>\n

So instead, I focused on secondary needs. What is the purpose of WordPress, and what\u2019s a user\u2019s greatest pain point that isn\u2019t being served?<\/span><\/p>\n

In my case, I decided it was figuring out what the hell to write about<\/strong>. Having run a company, I know that it can be a pain to write content about widgets every day. I mean, how much can a person say about widget x?<\/span><\/p>\n

Problem Definition: Making it easier to come up with ideas about what to write about.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Having the Aha! Moment<\/h3>\n

So again, I began researching. How do writers aggregate data relevant to their topic?<\/span><\/p>\n

The answer was by monitoring RSS feeds, twitter, news sites, etc.<\/p>\n

So my product would put that very front end right into WordPress. Grabbing RSS feeds, and putting them directly into the WordPress backend.<\/p>\n

This is going to be our product.<\/p>\n

Product Definition: RSS feed aggregator integrated into WordPress with the ability to put excerpts into post automatically<\/strong><\/p>\n

Total Time Defining Product: About 30 minutes<\/strong><\/p>\n

Leveraging Existing Technology<\/h3>\n

So we\u2019ve defined our product roughly. The question now becomes: <\/span><\/p>\n

What existing technology can I leverage to solve this problem?<\/span><\/p>\n

It turns out, there\u2019s an incredible library for manipulating RSS feeds in PHP called SimplePie<\/a>. It\u2019s dead simple to use, and it\u2019s got great examples. I build upon one of the examples and get my RSS feeds working in under an hour.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Plugging into WordPress<\/h3>\n

I don\u2019t want to say WordPress is poorly documented, because it isn\u2019t. However, it is pretty dry to read technical writing. That being said, my next job was to bring my nice SimplePie based RSS reader right on into the WordPress backend.<\/span><\/p>\n

To do so, I needed to create a plugin skeleton for WordPress, and add a plugin for TinyMCE. These two meant I had to go back and forth between the WordPress and TinyMCE documentation to figure out how the two fit together.<\/span><\/p>\n

But once it was all plugged in, I had a working prototype another hour and a half into my actual work. <\/span><\/p>\n

Total time to build the actual product: 2 1\/2 hours<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Finding a Marketplace<\/h3>\n

This was the real opportunity for efficiency. As part of my experiment, I didn\u2019t want to spend a dime on building a market or processing sales. As the day wore on, I decided this could make a great example for someone with absolutely no monetary resources.<\/span><\/p>\n

So I began researching markets to publish my Commercial WordPress Plugin to. <\/span><\/p>\n

There was my old favorite, the Envato Marketplace<\/a>, but they charge a ridiculous commission structure. Something like 50% if you decide you want to retain control to your own product.<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s just a little too high, even for me.<\/span><\/p>\n

So I kept looking, and found this great site, wpplugins.com<\/a>. Turns out they only want a 10% commission to add your software to their marketplace. <\/span><\/p>\n

However, they insist upon all plugins being released under the GPL, and so I needed to go back and make sure all my code had the GPL inserted into it. However, I signed up for an account, created a zip file, and began writing the documentation for my plugin.<\/span><\/p>\n

All told, creating some screenshots, writing up a description and cleaning up code probably took more time than writing the actual software. <\/span><\/p>\n

Total Time Finding Marketplace, Writing Copy: 3 hours<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Success! The product has been built and sent out in under a day!<\/p>\n

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Finally, Watching the Money Roll In<\/h3>\n

With the marketplace I chose, there was a delay in waiting for my plugin to be approved. However, from the very first day I had sales.<\/p>\n

I chose a very low cost for my product, because I believe people don\u2019t have a problem paying for something if it\u2019s less work than pirating it.<\/p>\n

That being said, my product is being sold at .95 per copy. If you\u2019re interested, you can see a video of it in action below:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

You can check out the final product, Content Avalanche here<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

via kpkaiser.com<\/a><\/div>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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