Purpose

The objective of this game is to improve a solution by brainstorming & thinking through various scenarios and alternatives. Using gamifaction and storytelling, participants are far more likely to be engaged. Keeping it lighthearted and fun will increase the energy.

Where this works best

• Solution ideation phase
• Getting stakeholders on-board

How to Play

Divide the group into teams; “challenge teams” and “solutions team”. The “solution team” brainstorm (silently) features, strengths, tactics, rebuttals etc of the solution, writes them on index cards, one per card. The other teams, the “challenge” team brainstorm (silently) potential problems or challenges and writes them on index cards, one problem or challenge per card. The “challenge” team(s) break-out and order their problems and challenges from top to bottom.

When the games starts, the teams work together to tell a collaborative story. The “challenge” team picks a card, starting at the top of their deck, describing a scene or event where the issue might realistically arise.

The “solution” team must then pick a card from their deck that addresses the challenge.

If they have a solution they that solves the problem or challenge put to them, they get a point, and if they don’t the “challenge” team gets a point. The game continues in this rythm, challenges followed by solution, and so on, until the allocated time-frame has been reached or there are no further challenges.

Where the “challenge” team won a point, these challenges are then revisited, and both teams then co-create a solution that addresses the challenge.

Ways to build a solution was originally published in 12startups on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What is indiehunters.com?

It’s a community for makers.

Get immediate help from a community of successful makers, when you need it most!

Indie Hunters

Why am I building an Indie Hunters list?

I regularly feel like I am out at sea on my own(see what I did there re the hero pic 😃 I am also devilishly handsome — A young Matt Damon to play me in a move adaption of my life story blah blah)

I like to chat.

I like to help.

I don’t like forum type capability, I want real-time interactions with people.

I don’t like people who have an agenda.

I like free stuff.

But there are numerous communities out there already

Once upon a time I really wanted to be part of the wip.chat community, but it’s member are becoming so self-absorbed that I can’t be bothered anymore. If you’re not in, you’re out. I choose out. Honestly, wip.chat is about as welcoming as Stack Overlow. But at least you can get an answer on Stack Overflow, in wip.chat, to me at least, all one gets is gifs, ridicule and god-like preening (to clarify these as just my opinions from the sideline, I’m sure if I stumped up the $150 per year 😙 that might change — but I can’t help the way I feel).

Then there are communities Product Hunt which is amazing, but again it feels like you have be part of the crowd or have a unicorn product to get noticed. I really struggle with the timezone for Product Hunt — it feels like if you are not in USA then everything becomes that bit more difficult.

Indie Hackers is awesome, but I don’t like the structured forum feeling.

Reddit is awesome, but there is a lot of rubbish before you get to the good stuff.

I wanted to created a small community where people could chill, shoot the breeze and get a bit of help along the way. Kind of like the anti Stack Overflow. Dumb questions are embraced, people answer the same questions time and time again. People are encouraged to ship. People are encouraged to be their whole selves. Everyone’s success is celebrated. People like me could have a home :wipe dust from my eye gif:.

What do I hope to achieve?

An area of the internet when I, and people like me, can feel at home with kindred spirits. A sense of belonging.

Why indiehunters.com?

I think the audience will primarily be indie makers — and those who frequent Indie Hackers, and Product Hunt. Plus the domain was available. Why not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What’s the tech stack?

Haha. Carrd.co for the website. Telegram for the community chat.

What does success look like?

Essentially this will die if there is not an active community. At a guess I think this needs to be in the 200–300 range to provide value. It could grow to more but I’m not sure that would be valuable for newbies. A small and cozy group of active contributors is how I would define success 👊

What’s Indie about Hunting? was originally published in 12startups on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m launching at least 12 startups in 12 months

Jan

Mainly spent reconvering from the festivities, setting goals and prepping like a boss.

Feb

What did I launch?

Accessthisability

Read why I built accessthisabibility.com.

Making your product better - Accessthisability

What would I have done different?

I’m not sure that customer’s understand the value proposution. I’m not sure I understand the value proposition. Also, I don’t have a direct way to monetise with hindsight I would have a product to monetise and then launch on Product Hunt..

Tools used?

Namecheap,Carrd.

Success or Failure?

Failure.

Will I continue with this?

Yes; although this definitely has not been a success, it is a passion project of mine

Social channels?

Accessthisability is live on Product Hunt

March-ish

What did I launch?

The Journo List

TheJournoList - Contacts that matter

What would I have done different?

Probably not bothering to launch.

Tools?

Namecheap,Carrd, Airtable.

Success or Failure?

Failure.

Will I continue with this?

No; It was an epic failure. I’ll leave it be for as long as the domain is live, but won’t put much love into it.

Social channels?

Nada.

Also March-ish

What did I launch?

Cancer is a cunt.

Cancer is a cunt 🖕🖕🖕

What would I have done different?

Have a clearer value proposition.

Tools?

Namecheap, Carrd, Glitch, Twitter.

Success or Failure?

Failure.

Will I continue with this?

Yes — it for a good cause, and is relatively low level maintenance.

Social channels?

Twitter.

Cancer is a cunt 🖕🖕🖕🖕 (@cancerisacunt) | Twitter

April-ish

What did I launch?

Adobe Community.

I had previously established a Slack Channel for a specific niche — which I wanted to rebrand & extend.

Adobe Community

What would I have done different?

I previously got more traction focussing on a niche area so I should have just focussed on that niche and served it well before broadening. There was also no need to launch a seperate Medium publication.

Tools?

Namecheap, Carrd, Glitch, Medium, Slack, Twitter.

Success or Failure?

Failure.

Will I continue with this?

Maybe — is relatively low level maintenance, but I think it needs a community manager of sorts.

Social channels?

Twitter.

Adobe_Community (@adobe_community) | Twitter

Slack

Join Adobe Community on Slack!

Medium

adobe community

May-ish

What did I launch?

Open Makers Club.

Open Makers

What would I have done different?

I initially launched on a different domain but changed midway through — not a problem but maybe something I could have expected. Biggest learning is that I could have done something on Twitter to crowd-source info, and still ended up with the same information. I put too much effort into this without knowing what my goal was first.

Tools?

Namecheap, Carrd, AirTable.

Success or Failure?

Failure.

Will I continue with this?

Maybe — I like the domain name, and I think there may be some opportunity in the#openmakers and #AMAopenmaker series. I also feel that there is something in Maker Deals ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Social channels?

Nada

June

Massive restructure at my full-time job, so I didn’t do much, but I did spend time setting up the #12startupschallenge.

At the start of the month I made a post on Indie Hackers which inspired me to have another bash at this.

Anybody want to signup to a Startup challenge?

Eventually I recruited some participants and we agreed on the challenge. I even got Mubashar Iqbal 😍to follow me on Twitter as a result of it.

July

What did I launch?

Indie Hunters.

Indie Hunters

What would I have done different?

Nothing.

The timing of this launch was terrible. Product Hunt chat launched at almost the exact same time, and Dinuka’s Maker’s Kitchen also launched at almost the exact same time. I’m pretty sure Maker’s Kitchen launched the exact same day but there was a massive silver lining…….

Tools?

Namecheap, Telegram.

Success or Failure?

Success — this will sound weird as the actual startup will end up a failure but I immediately found what I was looking for myself when I found Maker’s Kitchen. The dude and dudette’s in that community rock ✊

Will I continue with this?

Maybe — it’s relatively low level maintenance. The emotion I have weighing on me right now is whether another community is needed. I actually found what I was seeking when I launched Indie Hunters when I joined Maker’s Kitchen.

Social channels?

Nada

Also July

What did I launch?

Break the Internet Music.

Break the Internet: Music

Techically I built this a coupe of years back now (I think 🤔) but I never did anything with it. Like anything. I think it may have been published but had 0 visitor so I class this as new.

At this stage it is too early to tell what is going to happen.

What’s in the pipeline?

I’m debating a couple of things but I think I will end up doing:

• Something Yoga related. Scratching an itch.
• Something Travel realted. Scratching an itch.
• Something Jobsite related. Focussing on a niche I know.
• Reinventing 12startups.com. Actually it’s not re-inventing, it’s executing upon the vision that I initially had years back. Where this counts will be debatable but if I don’t reach 12 it certainly will 😝

What have I learned doing this so far?

• I keep reverting back to community building
• I’m terrible at community building
• My copy-writing for landing pages suck
• My graphics skills needs work
• I need to move on from my throw enough mud and it may stick scatter-gun approach
• I should do more research (as an aside I am a Product Manager at a telco so I think my ‘just do’ attitude stems from there if I’m being honest)
• Being in New Zealand is a disadvantage for launching to Product Hunt and Reddit etc (disadvantage is the wrong word — it’s fine; I just need to plan better and post at better times)
• I am clueless when it comes to timezones
• I’m rapidly loosing respect for those that I initally looked up to as maker demi-gods
• ….

What have I learned at the end?

This will likely be a post by itself.

My Progress Report was originally published in 12startups on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you have ever created a Slack group for a community, you will understand the pain to add new users.

Luckily, there is a real nifty piece of Open Software that you can use to automate the process and make your life simplier.

Introducing Slackin

Public Slack organizations made easy

rauchg/slackin

Getting to grips with Slackin may seem daunting but it is pretty straight forward once you know what do do.

Things you will need are:

• Your team id i.e XXXXXX.slack.com
• API token
• Somewhere to host Slackin

Team ID

Team id is pretty straight forward.

API Token

API token is more difficult. For some reason I always have difficuly finding on Slack where to generate this, so what I have done is save the link. The only place I can find where to generate a token is in Legacy. This cant be correct but it works for me so meh 🤷‍♂. The link can be found below, if there is a more up-to-date version then please let me know

Legacy tokens

Hosting

This is the fun bit.

You can self-host but you will more than likely have to maintain servers etc & do some DNS shizzle for slackin to be publicly accessible. Ain’t nobody got time for that. 👎

Previously I have also hosted Slackin on Heroku. Some developers rave about Heroku, but I personally don’t the hype. Each to their own though. Some configuration is required, and I will have to admit that I had to Google how to actually get it up and running, but once I did there was no further issue. I do however get annoyed at receiving so many email from Heroku when Dynamo hours are running out (what can I say — I don’t like to pay for things if I don’t have to). Overall IMO not worth the effort. 👎

If you haven’t already checked out Glitch then you are missing out.

Glitch: The friendly community where everyone builds the web

For me, it literally blew my mind.

Running Slackin on Glitch is a piece of piss. Honestly it is so straightforward, it is insance.

All you have to do find an existing project using Slackin, remix it, rename it, pop in your team ID and token in the .env file, and bobs your uncle. Like, literally, it will take no more than 58 seconds. And, you have it publicly accessible by my using the {{project}}.glitch.me address.

To help you finding one, use one of mine.

Glitch

Summary

Use Glitch, its bloody awesome

If you have any questions about using, please let me know.

Please 👏 and share to social networks to get this in front of people who might like the challenge

💪 💪 💪 💪 💪

If you have read this far, let me know if there is anything you want to hear about?

How to automate Slack signups was originally published in 12startups on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You are probably reading this as you are interested in, or are competing in, the #12startupschallenge.

Proposals

#1. Service company for SaSS suggested by @coolmate108

Build a service/product that helps existing saas companies get more customers.

The concept is simple, get SAAS / Services companies that have no freemium model, charge them for every person you help onboard to their service / SAAS

Have a membership to a cult like club for those that want to try new products and be their ambassadors as such spreading word of mouth

As an example of this type of service company, check-out:

SoPost

#2. Marketplace for X suggested by me

Build a service/product that ‘connects’ people with ‘things’

As an example of this type of service company, check-out:

Airbnb: Incredible places to stay and things to do

#3. Smart contract for X suggested by me

Let’s face it, blockchain is everywhere and is growing.

Build a service/product that utilises this technology.

As an example of this type of product, check-out:

Home | ethereum.org

#4. Community for X suggested by me

This is probably the most straight-forward of the proposals.

Build a community of people (not bots) around a particular topic (can be anything)

As an example of this type of product, check-out:

Indie Hackers: Work Together to Build Profitable Online Businesses

#5. Sell physical product(s) suggested by me

Sourcing and selling physical product. We will have to agree on what the categories are.

As an example of this type of product, check-out:

Any online store d’oh. For this challenge though, think selling something like flower pots 😆

Next Steps

I’m totally open to swapping out any the ideas that were suggested by moi. However, if there is nothing better suggested, then the focus will be to recruit people to the challenge.

I’m thinking something between 5 and 10 people will be a good number 🤷‍♂

If you want to compete join Telegram Group and Slack Group.

I’ll will ask you to complete a post asking you why your are doing it, and what you hope to achieve 👍

Please 👏 and share to social networks to get this in front of people who might like the challenge

💪 💪 💪 💪 💪

If you have read this far, let me know if there is anything you want to hear about?

#JulyChallenge was originally published in 12startups on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why am I building an #openmakers list?

Personally, I get huge amounts of inspiration from reading makers stories on Twitter & on Indie Hackers. It’s awesome to read & hear their stories in an authentic way. I & other makers can empathise with their struggles and are happy when they are successful.

Like all of my side projects, I started this to stratch my own itch. I’m tired of scrolling through my Twitter feed searching for random posts — what I want to be able to do is visit a centralised place where I can just see a list of makers who are open in their approach. They don’t have to have to be making eye-watering amounts of money, instead I want to see how they are getting on (hopefully they are progressing 📈).

It is something that I believe others will also be interested in.

What do I hope to achieve?

Well I have a couple of aspirations:

• Become the de-facto source of truth for listing open makers.
• Build upon my own brand by growing my following on twitter for @real12startups and @willpower_iam
• Making connections with other makers and growing my network
• Providing inspiration for other makers who need that extra push

Why Digiquire.com?

I won’t lie — it’s a domain that I previously purchased and wasn’t being used. We have all been there — 2 am in the night and purchasing a random domain because it might someday be useful.

Stop buying domain names and then never using them. I must have 30-to-40 alone on namecheap that I do not use and probably never will

And following my own resolutions for 2018 and not purchasing additional domains unless absolutely necessary, I decided to use www.digisquire.com because, if this side project is going to succeed then I don’t think the domain name will matter that much 🤷‍♂

What’s the tech stack?

I could spend more time on this and try to build an application using Firebase or Laravel — stacks that I am interested in learning more about — but for this particular project I didn’t feel it was necessary.

Instead I chose a super simple stack.

I use www.carrd.co for the website, and www.airtable.com for the data-source.

If it’s gets more traction I’ll re-assess my options. Until then oh-well 🤷‍♂

How are you measuring success?

Of course I have Google Analytics installed, however I will not be using analytics as a primary success measure (possibly not even using it at all).

Instead I’m going to break down my aspirations & have success measures for each. I could make this objectives (grow X% by Y month) but I don’t want to take it that seriously.

Success measures:

Become the de-facto source of truth for listing open makers.

• Growing number of #openmakers submissions by the makers themselves

Build upon my own brand by growing my following on twitter for @real12startups and @willpower_iam

• More followers
• More interactions on Twitter
• Press coverage of www.digisquire.com, www.12startups.com , and this very publication

Making connections with other makers and growing my network

• There are some specific makers, who I admire, that I really want to connect with
• Makers willing to be part the #AMAopenmaker series for this publication

Providing inspiration for other makers who need that extra push

• The most difficult to quantify — I think the best approach here will be based on my social interactions with other makers. Even if I only help inspiring one maker — I will be worth it 🍹

How can I, as a reader, help?

• You can add yourself, or other open makers to the list
• You can share this article
• You can send me good vibes

Please 👏 and share to social networks to get this in front of people who might like the challenge

Over & Out

💪 💪 💪 💪 💪 👊 👊 👊 👊 👊

A curated list of makers shipping awesome products in the open was originally published in 12startups on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Our audience is a community of entrepreneurs, developers, and bootstrappers who are keen to share their experiences & keen to learn from others.

We’re looking for passionate people who can help our audience to get inspired. We are keen for for people to share their stories, advice, do’s & don’ts, failures & successes. We want people who are willing to share information that they wish they knew before they started their own adventure

We are looking for real people who are available and willing to take time away from building their own business, to provide value to our community.

We are looking for people:

• irrespective of how much experience they have
• irrespective of the number of successes or failures they have
• with attitude and passion
• are open makers

The Topics We Are Looking For

• Open making
• Product Ideation & Validation
• Fundraising & Founder Experiences
• Software & Web Development
• Marketing, Sales & Growth Hacks
• Emotional Support & Helpful Resources

How To Submit Your Articles?

Please send an email to: 12startups.com [@] gmail.com with a link to your Medium draft or already published Medium article.

We strongly prefer unpublished drafts.

This ensures that articles gain the most exposure possible.When drafts are published, they appear at the top of the timeline in the “Latest” section of our home page and are promoted across our social media channels.

We do accept previously published pieces, however they can only be featured on the home page through trending since they are added to the publication based on their original publishing date.

Before you submit a story:

• Be sure to inform us if the story has been published or submitted on other site, blog or publication.
• If you’re not the author, be sure to tell us what organization you work for and spell out your relationship to the author.
• No link spam (Don’t link to same external domain more than once).

Writing Guide:

• Title: Your headline is the most important part of your story. A good headline makes all the difference. Utilize this tool.
• Images: Featured image is a most important aspect of your story. Include a great cover image.
• Code: Use Medium shortcuts to turn your code into formatted code block. You can also embed code from Github Gists, CodePen.io , JSFiddle.net
• Examples: Provide a clear examples, details, and/or data.
• Sources: Give credit to original sources of information.
• Readability: Utilize Medium formatting options to make content more readable to readers.
• Teach: Explain everything. Do not assume that the reader will understand
• Personality: Everyone has one. Please show yours and aim to be authentic.
• Tags: Add up to five tags to your story. People follow these tags will see your story in feed.

Want a sponsored something?

Want to promote your services? (It should be useful to our audience). Send an email to: 12startups.com [@] gmail.com for more details.

Thank you. Don’t forget to follow us on twitter.

Inspire and make your mark on the 12startups community was originally published in 12startups on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Accessthisability is now on Product Hunt. Gives us an upvote 👊

Web accessibility ensures that people of all abilities can perceive, understand, navigate, interact with, and contribute to the applications you create — essentially this means that the applications are Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust.

Let me start by saying — I don’t identify as having any disabilities. However, as you may see from my goals for 2018, I like being able to help others (especially those who are disadvantaged), in whatever way I can.

Creating accessible products — especially digital products — is something that I believe we can do.

I actually get quite annoyed when I’m browsing a particular website, or using a particular app — and well, it doesn’t do what I expect it to do. It actually irritates me.

I, partially to do with my previous role as a digital analyst, generally have Javascript blocked or not running. It amazes me that so many websites rely on JS to actually function. It’s actually quite sad.

I also use a MacBook without a mouse — I don’t use the trackpad that much — so end up using my keyboard only to navigate a website. Again, it is staggering the amount of websites that just don’t work unless you have a mouse.

My favourite however, is when I inspect the code of websites and see when they style divs to make them look like specific elements; rather than using the semantic element itself.

Why bother?

I’m fully-abled, yet get incredibly pissed-off when things don’t work as I expect, and I am marginally inconvenienced.

Can you image what it feels like to have to live in a world when nobody seems to make an effort? Does it make you feel like nobody cares?

Imagine being blind and a fuck-off picture is used to describe the author’s sentiment. Imagine being a vision impairment and trying to use instagram or twitter.

Rob Long on Twitter

I'm a blind twitter user. There are a lot of us out there. Increase your ability to reach us and help us interact with your pictures, it's really simple and makes a huge difference to our twitter experiance allowing us to see your images our way.

There are numerous other example of how people are being effectively discriminated against, but will anything change?

Scale

How about if I told you the size of the number of people affected?

To give you an indication of scale (in the US alone):

• Number of adults with hearing trouble: 37.2 million
• Percent of adults with hearing trouble: 15.3%
• Number of adults with vision trouble: 22.9 million
• Percent of adults with vision trouble: 9.4%
• Number of adults unable (or very difficult) to walk a quarter mile: 18.2 million
• Percent of adults unable (or very difficult) to walk a quarter mile: 7.5%
• Number of adults with any physical functioning difficulty: 39.6 million
• Percent of adults with any physical functioning difficulty: 16.3%

Or to put this another way — 1 in 4 people identify as having some form of disability.

Accessthisability

The ambition of accessthisability is straight forward.

To connects makers with people to make great products.

Simple really ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you are interested, all you have to do is sign-up.

Why I built accessthisability.com was originally published in 12startups on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What I will be launching? Basic websites which serve a specific purpose & intermediate to advanced applications. I know already that some may fail & some will succeed. I accept that already.

I want to fail. I want to try. I want to learn. I want to improve. I want to succeed.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” — Thomas A. Edison

Why dude??

Like so many others, I have started heaps — and executed very little.

I keeps all my ideas as one liner Reminders on my MacBook. As it stands I have (at the time of writing) 134 ideas that I would like, but have currently failed, to execute. Wow! This numbers is frightening — I actually thought that it would be somewhere between 20 & 30. These aren’t random ideas either — these are issues/problems that I have personally faced, or though “wouldn’t it be great if a solution exited for this”, over the past couple of years.

Procrastination and self-doubt are a bitch. Not anymore. Social accountability ftw! Let’s fucking do this.

My progress report

Jan

Prepping everything like a boss!

I’m launching at least 12 startups in 12 months was originally published in 12startups on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Launching can be hard 😵. Don’t know where to start?

You will find a list of tools that we use on a day-to-day basis to help you get started.

Tools that you will need to launch

• Cheap Domain Names - Buy Domain Names from $0.88 - Namecheap
• Carrd
• Beautiful Free Images & Pictures | Unsplash
• Blog Tool, Publishing Platform, and CMS - WordPress.org
• Zapier: Automate AI Workflows, Agents, and Apps
• Firebase | Google's Mobile and Web App Development Platform
• Cloud Application Platform | Heroku
• You don't need to be a coder
• Ecommerce Software - Best Ecommerce Platform Made for You - Free Trial
• Airtable | Everyone's app platform
• DigitalOcean - The developer cloud
• Stripe - Online payment processing for internet businesses
• Backblaze Online Backup
• Hotjar: Website Heatmaps & Behavior Analytics Tools
• Beautiful, free stock video footage for your homepage

Productivity tools

• iTerm2 - macOS Terminal Replacement
• f.lux
• Postman | The Collaboration Platform for API Development
• Pocket
• Master Password - Secure your life, forget your passwords.
• Music for everyone.
• Visual Studio Code - The open source AI code editor
• Discord - Group Chat That's All Fun & Games
• Slack is your productivity platform
• Grammarly: Free AI Writing Assistance
• Hemingway Editor
• Capture, organize, and tackle your to-dos from anywhere | Trello
• Flowchart Maker & Online Diagram Software
• The digital design toolkit
• Placeholder.com - Quick & Simple Placeholder Images, Text & More

Thanks for reading. If you have and questions or think that something should be added, please reach out

💪 💪 💪 💪 💪

Tools of the trade was originally published in 12startups on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.