I skipped almost all of these steps with my other ventures. I had no bank account or landing page and didn’t even consider my ideal customers. I just had what I thought was a good idea, so I started building it. I didn’t validate the project to see if anyone was interested because I thought "I want that, so it must be something people want," or "I think that 's clever, so I think I 'll build it, and other people will sign up for it." I then spent weeks and months working on these ideas on the side and at night. Most of the time I would get bored and give up on the project or if I finished it, no one would sign up when it was launched. I did this for so many years it 's kind of embarrassing.
AppFog was the first time I did something different, and this change in my usual game plan occurred because I was too tired to jump right into the programming right away.
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Like every other occasion, I had an idea. The lightbulb moment occurred when I started moving my own applications to Heroku, which is a really cool platform that is a service for developers to build apps easier. I had lots of Ruby applications which transferred perfectly, but I ran into a problem when moving my PHP applications because at the time, Heroku didn 't do anything but Ruby.
I wanted to move everything and couldn’t because there’s PHP. The
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The success of Appfog was not an accident. Offering a solution to a problem people know they have versus one you think they have makes all the difference. PHP Fog, or AppFog as it ended up, was something people were already looking for, so I never spent a cent on marketing. The original landing page provided validation for my idea and my “Aha” moment. If I had been less tired that first night, creating the landing page would have been scary. Putting your ideas out there and finding that people don’t care as much as you do or that your idea is not a hair on fire problem can seem like the worst thing ever. It is not the worst thing, so create a landing page,