This musing is not about the value of Instagram, or the why Facebook may have bought it. It’s quite simply about what we as creatives can learn from it.

In two years, or thereabouts, Instagram went from an idea to a company worth $1 billion.

Think for a second. How many ideas did you have two or more years ago that you haven’t acted on? I know that I’ve had hundreds. Hell, I’ve had about a dozen app ideas in the last few months that I’ve done nothing with.

Ideas are worth nothing without execution, and I know this more than most.

Don’t sit on you ideas.  Bring them to life now. See if they sink or swim. Who knows what incredible things you might create?

Derek Sivers already said this better than I can here.

Scott Belsky wrote a book about it.

Seth Godin talks about this all the time.

We all know this, but what’s stopping us?

Do it. Stop consuming, start creating.

This is not forgotten about, it’s just I’ve decided to go ‘all in’ on my business and my time and efforts have been focused exclusively there for the last few weeks. From a personal point of view this is fantastic. My business is growing rapidly and I’m loving every minute of it. I’ve got some great clients and I’m learning all the time.

Those of you who have read this site for a while know that I’ve lacked focus on past projects. Now I have something to focus on that I am truly 100% committed to and it’s been easy for me to focus my efforts there. It does however mean that some of my existing projects have stalled.

It is my full intention to complete “How To Build Something Incredible” soon, but for the next few weeks I intend to go all in with my time to work on my business. Finally focusing is one area is really paying off – I highly recommend it.

Thanks to all those who’ve provided support and guidance on this and previous projects. I’m not going anywhere, my time is just being used for other things at the moment.

Please note: This post is a first draft. Please leave your thoughts in the comments below, and make sure you are signed up for email updates to get a free copy of the finished eBook straight to your inbox at the end of Feb 2012.

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15:  Time To Review

You’re doing great – let’s recap what you’ve achieved so far (assuming you’ve been following along).

You’ve picked one incredible thing to build.

You’ve created a vision for what you eventually want that to be.

You’ve built a minimal viable version of it and put it live.

You’ve gathered feedback and pushed out a few more iterations.

You’ve continued to build slowly.

That’s a fantastic set of achivements and I hope you’ll agree that this method leads to more fun work and better creations.

Now comes your time to review.

I don’t want you to spend too long on this step. For many people the pupose of a review is to determine what could have been done better – for the purposes of doing the same thing again. While you might use some of the same techniques again, it is likely that when you come to build your next thing you’ll do it in a different way.

The purpose of this review is to look at what is working well and continue doing it.

Update your vision as needed, correct course, maybe do another quick planning session (don’t forget to throw your plans out again once you’ve done them).

This is a difficult thing, but it might be time to quit. Not everything works out. The purpose of putting something live is to see if it works and you don’t truly know until you do just that. It might be that it’s not working.

At this point there are several things you can do.

• Try something completely different
• Change what you are doing based on what is working.
• Keep going for a few more iterations.

It can be hard to change or let go when you truly belive in what you are creating. Remember it is fun first, and if you are enjoying what you are doing then it is defintely worth carrying on.

However, with the feedback loop and the iterations it might be that the people who are consuming your creations are steering you to something that they want more. Maybe they’ve come up with ideas that you hadn’t thought of previously or maybe you are on to a winner with your original vision.

Take a brief look at where you are and be honest with yourself about the best path for you to take now to keep going personally.

Do you continue down the same path, do you change course or do you mark this up as a learning experience and try something else. Only you can answer this honestly. There is no shame in any route you take – just keep striving towards building something incredible.

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If you have any comments on the above approach, i’d love to hear them!

With 5 more chapters left to write, I feel that I need to do exactly that.

Reviewing is important to check that you are still on track with your vision, that you are making continuous improvements towards your something incredible and you still have the right level of interest to drive you forward.

With that in mind, I’m going to take the next few days to review what I’ve written so far, incorporate the excellent feedback I’ve had so far from readers (thanks!), and then plan the closing chapters of the book.

The meat of the book is drafted now so I think this is a natural point to pause.

If you have any further feedback let me know. I’ll resume the live writing in a few days.

Any new chapters will be written live, but any additional bits and changes to existing chapters will be released in to the finished book at the end of February.

Thanks again for all your support.

Chris

Please note: This post is a first draft. Please leave your thoughts in the comments below, and make sure you are signed up for email updates to get a free copy of the finished eBook straight to your inbox at the end of Feb 2012.

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The best way to build something is to do it in small bits consistently.

Let’s take this book for example. I’m writing a few hundred words a day. Two weeks in and I’ve got thousands of words and most of the first draft complete.

If I’d just thought about it, or done a big plan, or looked for other things for two weeks I wouldn’t have those thousands of words or most of a first draft ready.

If I had sat down to write the whole book in one go it would have been daunting.

By doing a little every day you can start straight away and make more progress than you think.

In the same way we over estimate how much we can do in a day and under estimate how much we can do in a year we must grasp that a little bit over a little time can lead to big changes.

This a little bit everyday also lends itself well to the new way of building something incredible.

We can make small, incremental improvements that are pushed out regularly rather than work towards big projects that get delayed and then may not land right with our audience.

Whatever you are building, commit to doing a little bit every day. It helps if you have a couple of weeks of tasks split in to days ready to go.

Don’t expect to build something incredible in a day. Do expect something incredible to start to take shape over the course of a few weeks and months.

Just keep going.

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What do you think?

Please note: This post is a first draft. Please leave your thoughts in the comments below, and make sure you are signed up for email updates to get a free copy of the finished eBook straight to your inbox at the end of Feb 2012.

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So you’ve got your first iteration out there. Now you need to work on your next one. In fact this is a continuous process. You must keep going.

There comes a point where you have to work out whether it is worth keep iterating or whether you need to quit and try something else. You certainly shouldn’t even be entertaining this option until you have done at least one iteration.

What you will learn from going live with your something and working you feedback in to future iterations is what people are after.

It might be different to what you first set out to do.

That’s fine. You just need to make sure that you vision is still valid and you keep working towards it.

You can’t have all the answers. That’s why you need to gather feedback, iterate and continue.

The path will form in front of you the further along this journey you go.

Keep building iterations 2,3,4,5,6 and so on.

Please note: This post is a first draft. Please leave your thoughts in the comments below, and make sure you are signed up for email updates to get a free copy of the finished eBook straight to your inbox at the end of Feb 2012.

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When you have gathered your feeback, you need to get an iteration of your something out as soon as possible?

There are a few reasons for this, but primarily it is because you are trying to build something incredible and you aren’t quite there yet. Will you ever be there? Maybe not, but that’s not the point. The idea is to get to your vision.

When you start to solicit that feedback, you’ll become a bit overwhelmed with ideas. Of course there isn’t just the feedback from the people you asked for it, but your own ideas as well.

Just as I wanted you to go live and get your stuff out there, now you need to get your next iteration out there.

Again don’t delay, because not improving and working towards your vision is almost as bad as not getting something out there in the first place.

Maybe your thing didn’t land with the audience quite as you were hoping? An iteration is a chance to make some changes so that you get a better chance of doing that.

But you won’t know until you get that next iteration out there. So do that, and then we can move to the next step.

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Still following? Let me know!

Please note: This post is a first draft. Please leave your thoughts in the comments below, and make sure you are signed up for email updates to get a free copy of the finished eBook straight to your inbox at the end of Feb 2012.

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That’s it, the hardest part is over – you’ve gone live!

Sit back relax and watch the money roll in…wait a minute, sorry folks but it doesn’t work that way.

The old method had the Go live as the big thing.

The new way says that the go live is just one (albeit important) step on the road building something incredible.

So you need to crack on with the next part – getting feedback.

Feedback is how you are going to turning your live something in to a incredible something. Feedback is how you are going to learn about the people who appreciate your art, your customers, how they think, act and what they want.

The first step to getting feedback is to ask for it. Sure you will get unsolicited feedback, but you will get more if you ask for it.

Be completely transparent about why you are asking for it and what you expect from the feedback. Encourage people to give you feedback of all sorts – positive and negative. Make it as easy as possible for them to provide you with feedback give them all the channels they need to get their message to you, both publically and privately.

Ask some more. And some more again. Never stop seeking feedback. Never stop thanking people for feedback (even if you don’t like or use it).

What do you do with your feedback?

You should review your feedback and be ruthless in cutting out things you don’t need. How do you do this?

The problem with feedback.
Feedback can quickly become overwhelming. Even just a few comments can have you questioning your direct and approach. Sometimes you get a lot of great ideas too and you wonder how you will ever work on them all (good job you’ve already put it live then).

The simple thing you need to do is sort your feedback. The best way to sort your feedback is to relate it back to your core vision.

For each item of feedback think, quickly about whether it relates to you core vision and whether it will add complexity to your creation.

Then sort in to three categories.

Yes
No
Maybe

That’s it.

Be ruthless. If it’s a ‘no’ or a ‘maybe’ then it’s probably a no.

If it’s a ‘maybe’ or a ‘yes’ it’s probably a maybe.

At all times be aware of keeping things focused and simple and building your core vision.

Once you’ve done this several times per iteration (iterations are explained in the next chapter) then you should go back to the planning stage. Do a plan, pick your top two things and then start to improve your something.

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How do you gather feedback?

Start to iterate…

Please note: This post is a first draft. Please leave your thoughts in the comments below, and make sure you are signed up for email updates to get a free copy of the finished eBook straight to your inbox at the end of Feb 2012.

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In the world of software development, where I have spent all of my working life, the ‘Go Live’ is the big thing.

It’s the thing that you’re working towards.

It’s the thing that’s probably been delayed by this, that or the other.

It’s the thing that people are scared off, because it is when real members of the public will get their fingers on what you’re putting out there.

There’s a whole methodology that supports getting to this point. It’s outdated and rarely works.

Fortunately you neither need to follow a methodology or an outdated system.

But you will need to put things live. You will need to get your creations out there for people to see.

When is the best time to do this?

When it comes to the digital world, and the world of building something incredible that needs to be sooner rather than later.

The sooner you go live, the sooner you get feedback and can start making your thing better.

The problem is we as humans encounter so many things that try and stop us putting something live.

We come up with so many excuses, changes and reasons NOT to put something out there that they sometimes are even abandoned.

You do not want to fall in to this trap.

You need to train yourself to put things live before they are ready. It’s scary but it’s worth it.

In the digital world nothing is permanent any more. Any problems can be rectified, quickly and any thing that you are holding back might be your killer feature.

That said, you need to not wait for everything to be perfect and this is where it links back to simplicity.

Your aim therefore is to get the first version of your something ready in the simplest form for it to be a little bit useful to a few people and then publish it. Get it out there.

Then you have momentum.

Once you have something out there you aren’t building up to a big go live anymore.

Instead you are working towards constant improvement of something that exists.

Is it better to work for 10 hours on something and then put it out or work for one hour and then spend 9 making it better? I would argue that in the digital world the latter is more important.

Go live should be sooner than you think.

Then you can really start to build something incredible.

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So what do you think?

Please note: This post is a first draft. Please leave your thoughts in the comments below, and make sure you are signed up for email updates to get a free copy of the finished eBook straight to your inbox at the end of Feb 2012.

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Execute

Now it’s time to execute.

The is the part where you start to deliver your something.

Some people would say that you need to do a lot more preparation first. A few may say that you’ve already started.

What I’ve tried to do is outline the fewest steps that you need to get going.

You need something to build.
You need a vision for what it will become.
You need your initial plan to start on the right path.

That’s it.

This is where a lot of people get stuck. I’ve been there.

You feel that you need to do learn some new skills, test the market some more, do some research or talk it over with some more people.

These are all delaying tactics.

All the information you could ever need to deliver is at your finger tips. You can learn as you go, when you get stuck you’ll be able to quickly and easily find the answer online.

You don’t need market research or analysis. You are creating what you want to create, who cares what the market thinks? People are really bad at knowing that they want something if it doesn’t exist yet.

So get going.

Do not delay a single moment more.

Clear you schedule and do the work necessary to get some momentum going.

It really is that simple.

By the way, if you don’t quite know which direction go in just start going in one direction. Your instincts will guide you and you can correct course as you go, in fact it’s better too.

Why haven’t you started yet? The sooner you start, the sooner you can get your something in front of some eyeballs, start to get some feedback and start to make it incredible.

The process from picking your something to executing and beginning to build it can be less than an hour. I’ve you’ve been waiting to get going for weeks just think about how much you could have achieved by now?

There are no excuses any more. The is only people who do things and those who don’t. Which camp are you in?

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Do you have any insights to share?