I'm launching 52 startups in 52 weeks

This year I’m setting the goal of launching 52 startups in 52 weeks.

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UPDATE: I actually think this is a bad idea. It’s encouraging me to rush things, and not got deep enough on any particular product to make something meaningful.

Therefore, I’ve decided to switch to 12 startups in 12 months. That’s a pretty solid timeframe for shipping things - still long enough to work on it, whilst not so short that you stay superficial.

But now, back to the original article:

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Pieter Levels (levels.io) did something similar in 2014. He set himself the goal of launching 12 startups in 12 months. During the first few months, he created NomadList and RemoteOK, both of which are still running and used today.

I’m going for 52 because:

  • I want to really push myself to ship stuff continuously
  • It feels (slightly) more original than going for 12 in 12 months
  • I’m pretty much full-time on this, so don’t really have an excuse

But 52 start-ups? Isn’t that crazy / impossible?

Well… yes, probably. But let’s clarify what I mean here by “start-ups”. In reality I’m talking about projects which could become start-ups. The intention from day 1 for each project is to monetise it and turn it into a start-up. However, (as with “true” start-ups), there’s a fair chance that most of them will fail. Also, “52 projects in 52 weeks” is too boring… so yes, part of this is framing 🙃.

Pieter defines a startup quite broadly as:

A startup delivers a new product and grows it fast

(Check out his article for more context.)

Progress Report

Week 0 (2nd Jan - 8th Jan): I came up with the idea of the 52 startups. I was still on holiday and didn’t truly ship anything, so not counting this week towards the 52.

Week 1 (9th Jan - 15th Jan): I launched CheckMyWriting.com. I summarised my learnings here.

Week 2 (16th - 22nd Jan): I launched my personal website (www.chrislovejoy.me). (Stretching the ‘startup’ idea here.. but I do hope to monetise this site at some point, and I spent 30+ hours on this, so didn’t have time to ship much else.)

Week 3 (23rd Jan - 29th Jan): I started to build a chatGPT-derived tweet-thread generator, but decided against it because it’s a pretty crowded space (and I’m not that passionate about viral tweet threads).

UPDATE: I switched up my approach, and haven’t written about this yet. May share more about this in future.