Why is it taking so long for us?
This is a question that I often ask my developer colleague and young Co-founder Vamsi Krishna.
I & Vamsi started working on Onemyle around the end of 2018. Prior to working with Vamsi, I had been working on and off around the same idea for lot longer with colleagues from my earlier venture (JustBooks). As of Aug 2024 I have been at it for close to 100 months now and we are still not 'live' with our product.
So, what explains?
Is this not the era of Fail Fast? Is this also not the era of two developers & six months of build effort to launch a product?
The short answer in my view is that not all products & not all ideas are born equal. The build effort is a factor of the 'layers' in the opportunity and iterations involved in peeling off a layer to gain insights.
The long answer is that one can take a 'top-down' approach or a 'bottom-up' approach to venture creation. In a 'bottom-up' approach one starts with a very specific use-case, establishes product-market fit for that use-case and slowly adds adjacent opportunities as layers to the venture as it grows. In a 'top-down' approach one starts with a somewhat generic definition of the opportunity that often encompasses multiple use-cases, builds a MVP that addresses a little bit of many of those use-cases and slowly builds completeness into each use-case as the venture grows.
Based on my past experience in Fin-Tech, building a 'core banking' product would be a 'top-down' approach (since it would involve building basic features for deposits, loans, cards, payments, channels etc on day 1 and then making each of them more complete over time) while building a 'payments company' would be a 'bottom-up' approach focusing only on payments first and then later moving into adjacent opportunities (like lending, investments etc over time).
Most B2C opportunities seem to align with the 'bottom-up' venture creation approach.
A 'top-down' approach in B2C space is generally termed risky - would often look like building a 'Super App' that does many things for many people and in popular opinion - one cannot build a Super App till there is one core (or anchor) use-case that becomes the heart of customer engagement.
But there are always exceptions to the rule.
We started Onemyle with a slightly abstract problem statement that the real world neighbourhoods are not represented well on the Internet. By extension, our hypothesis was that people still care to know about things happening around them and also care enough to engage with it - but there is currently no one elegant internet platform that enables this. A very abstract and somewhat broad hypothesis like this lends itself for a 'top-down' approach to building the solution.
More on our approach to the solution in a different post.
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