Day 1 - What am I going to build?

So it's day 1 of the $0 to $50k MRR in 18 months challenge and, more often than not, the hardest part is starting.

You know the deal.

You've got a blank piece of paper in front of you. It's looking you deadpan in the eye, taunting you with all the ways you could start but providing absolutely no answers.

Which sends your mind racing as you slowly talk yourself out of doing anything at all.

And that's exactly where I landed last night on Day 0.

I got back from the office, ran around the garden with my daughter as she played on her new hot pink slide (which she loves, by the way), sat down for dinner as a family, discussed the day's events and then I said goodnight to my wife and opened my laptop.

The blank page was staring at me and I could already feel the doubt creeping in.

And when that happens, I like to start giving myself constraints, because I could sit and plan all day and get nowhere. I've made that mistake far too many times in my life.

Over planning leads to overthinking -> overthinking leads to zero action.

And action provides clarity, as long as we can get over the pain of uncertainty.

So I started thinking about niches, in fact, I started thinking about niches of niches of niches. Maybe I niched too far, but I wanted to get specific.

I don't think I'm going to be building B2C apps at this stage because that often requires audience, which I don't have yet, and it can require serious VC capital, which I don't want.

At the end of the day, I'm not here to compete with app stores or build some massive VC-funded SaaS, I want to launch a series of profitable micro products.

I'm here to solve an incredibly painful and specific problem for a hyper-specific person.

So i needed to create some constraints, as in this context, constraints provide clarity.

So what are the starting constraints?

• B2B
• Hyper-specific problem
• Hyper-specific person

Getting the ball rolling

Now I had a rough idea of what and who I was going after, so naturally, the next question was:

• What are those businesses?
• How specialised can we get?
• And could I identify genuinely painful problems looking from the outside in?

So I created a new project, pointed Claude Code at it and got to work putting a research plan together.

Within that folder were two files giving Claude the context behind the challenge.

Once he'd parsed them and asked:

"Ready when you are — what would you like to do with these?"

I dropped this prompt.

It's day 0 and I need to start thinking about hitting that MRR and the only way to do that is to take action and start shipping.

So we need a research plan.

Let's think about niching into the niche of a niche. Each app targets a hyper-specific avatar.

For example.

General Practitioner → Haematologist → Sickle Cell Specialist → Sickle Cell Transition Specialist

We want to conduct research within the most niched pool possible, specifically businesses with money to spend, a problem we can identify and a decent-sized pool of individuals.

I want to explore those niches first and foremost.

Just a rough overview because, for each micro product I ship, I'll pick a hyper-specific niche with a specific problem as we need to test the validity of them as per he spec provided.

I used Fable 5 on Ultra, spun up 11 subagents and sent them out on a pretty serious research quest.

But then I hit the obvious problem.

AI is incredibly good at telling you that everything looks like an opportunity, and I didn't want a list of 100 clever ideas.

I wanted reasons to kill them.

So for the second pass, I flipped the job around, instead of asking Claude to find opportunities, I asked another agent to be the sceptic in the room and try to tear them apart.

• Could the problem actually hurt enough that someone would pay to solve it?
• Do these businesses have money?
• Are there enough of them?
• Can I reach them?
• Could I realistically build the thing myself with roughly 20 hours a week?
• Is the market already drowning in solutions?

And, probably most importantly, do I actually give a shit about the problem?

That took a big messy list and reduced it to 12–15 niches worth investigating further, I then picked four and went another level deeper.

This time the question wasn't:

"Is this an interesting problem?"

It was:

"Could this become a small profitable software business?"

Cost, complexity, legal headaches, how painful the problem really is, how easily I could reach the customer and, ultimately, how the thing makes money.

Four avatars and specialised businesses went into the validation test.

One came back with a pretty convincing green light.

I've still got another 11 opportunities to put through the same process, and the one that's currently sitting at the top needs a lot more poking before I'm willing to build it.

But that's tomorrow's problem.

The important bit is that a few hours earlier I was staring at a blank page with absolutely no idea what I was going to build.

Now I've got real businesses, real problems and at least one idea that might actually have legs.

I don't need certainty yet, I just need enough clarity to take the next step.

And I think that's probably the lesson from Day 1.

Constraints create clarity. Action creates the rest.

Tomorrow I'll keep digging.

Catch you in the next one.

Tariq