Last year I committed to building a physical product. And I did this because I understand the people who get into eCommerce. I want know what state of mind they're in, how they handle their finances, and what they do before they even start building an eCommerce site.

Last year I promised to get a product ready to launch on Kickstarter:

By the end of 2018 I want to have a product ready to go. I know the publishing and/or Kickstarter process can be long so by the end of 2018 I want to be ready to go under contract with a publisher or be ready to start planning my own Kickstarter campaign.

And I'm going to officially mark that goal as complete. I'm planning to launch my product on Kickstarter February 5th.

More than just having a product ready to go I learned a lot about:

• How product development isn't perfectly linear
• The importance of building an audience around your product
• How a tiny mistake can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars
• How every piece of data about pricing seems to contract every other piece and you just have to guess.
• The insane amount of time you have to spend marketing

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I've been writing a series of posts about creating a product. And for the most part I've been sharing things I've been learning and things “I've done right”. Today I wanted to share something that didn't break in my favor.

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Earlier this year I set a goal to create my own physical product. And the first few months were really fun.

I was logging a ton of product ideas and I was making quick and dirty prototypes.

• I hand wrote rules on cards
• I attended prototyping events
• I outsourced the design work
• I discovered a professional prototyping service

I moved at lightning pace. After 4 months in development one of the people I played with had no idea this wasn't a professionally made game.

And this where everything slowed down. Just like building a website for someone. The first 80% is easy because it's the stuff you know how to do. I've played enough games and I had a pretty good idea for a game so making the rules for the game was easy. But then I had to venture into a world that I didn't know.

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I've been thinking a lot about how we learn. And more and more I find value in experiential knowledge (things you learn by doing) over academic knowledge (things you learn by reading). For example…

• I learned how to skydive from someone who has skydived thousands of times.
• I've talked with parents about their experience raising their kids – rather than reading a book about raising kids.
• While preparing for a marathon I read a ton of blog posts about running and the advice I really appreciated was from people who actually ran marathons.
• I want to learn computer science from someone who has participated in computer science projects. Not someone who just repeats what their professor told them.
• I practice acro yoga and when I want to learn a new pose I do so with people who have done those poses before – not with people who just read about them.
• When I moved to Denver I decided to move and live in the city for a year and see how it went. Worst case scenario I would move back to Wisconsin. I looked up all of the stats before moving (crime rate, weather, cost of living, etc.) but ultimately I just couldn't understand that information until I actually experienced it.

You can consume a thousand articles, blog posts, books, videos, and conversations with people about a topic. But some topics are so big that you really can't understand it until you live it – like moving to Denver. I could pull up every metric about Denver (and I did make a spreadsheet), but I could never imagine what it's like living downtown in a big city versus living in Green Bay, Wisconsin (a much smaller city with very different values).

Denver is surrounded by gorgeous mountains

This isn't to say academic knowledge is useless. It's incredibly useful. Using academic knowledge I realized the Denver has way more sunny days than Portland & Seattle which is why Denver made it to the top of the list. Now, I can't fully imagine what it's like living in Denver surrounded by mountains but I was at least able to narrow down the list of cities based on some really useful data. And from there I had to experience Denver to know if it was the right choice for me.

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