Daniel Crenna

Code Soloist #4: Don’t extract

You’ll likely read lots of inspiring literature on business and technology to keep you motivated and learn from the best. In Rework, Jason and David point you down the path of seeking the “extraction”, explaining that you can’t just make one thing, and often the extractions you find along the way—a book of wisdom here, an open source web framework there—can lead to profit.

This is the purest form of product development because it already exists in your own application and it’s battle-tested. Since we thrive both intellectually and emotionally, perhaps to our detriment, on solving puzzles that also solve our own problems, it’s easy to see that something you create while building your business could be useful to others and earn a profit.

The problem with focusing on extractions as a soloist is that you’ve got limited bandwidth to explore these extractions and each requires its own commitment to marketing and polish, often the most difficult part of the product development process. This kind of energy always requires your full attention, which means an extraction takes away from your overall goal, even if you believe there’s a benefit in the long term.

You could abandon your business and make the extraction your business, but chances are doing so will not only establish in yourself a precedent that it’s okay to switch from one project to the next, but the quality of the extraction will suffer when its genesis changes from solving a real problem to being the problem.

You’ll probably invent three solutions along the way that could stand on their own. Release them after your product is finished. This will keep you on track, and will even lend credibility to your future extractions since you can market them with concrete examples.

Code Soloist is for single-person software development companies that are trying to start something big with their bare hands. In it, I try to impart whatever I’ve learned, for better or worse, doing the same thing badly.