This year, I started firo.in.

I ran a few trials and very quickly realized I didn’t want to push it further.

In the past, I’ve done many such things.  Before Tapprs worked out, I had a few dud ideas. Then I tried a Marketplace under Tapprs, but I screwed it up. I gave a shot at building a photographers directory service, but that hasn’t gained much traction.

Recently, I mentioned to a few friends that I would leverage my experience at Tapprs to experiment with customer satisfaction, business intelligence & automation tools (onemetric.io). They were aghast. Yet another stupid thing! There were few comments that weren’t exactly encouraging.

Yes, I have little clue, esp where I am headed towards. But it doesn’t matter much at this stage. Here’s why:

1. I pay for it with money I ‘earn’ the hard way!

   I have a company that makes money. And it pays for all my experiments with hard earned money. I am not burning ‘other people’s money’. I may not have a clue as to where I am headed, but I know what my burn is and how I can do crazy stuff and yet, sustain myself.

2. Investing for the future

   So irrespective of what happens to these ideas, I know I will learn something that will be useful in future. I am maximising learning - thats it. I learnt a ton of other stuff like marketing, product development, a bit of design, etc. 2 years ago, I struggled to build our own app for Tapprs, but now I can build complete web apps without external help. I can setup my own server which was like Latin 2 years back. All that adds up.

3. It’s way better to work on a bad idea than to wait for a perfect idea

   That perfect idea happens to very few people. Rest of us have to keep digging. Why wait - just keep churning through ideas.

4. Improving my luck

   Call it spray and pray or whatever. But if I go do something, I improve my odds. It’s as simple as that.

5. Stepping out of comfort-zone deliberately

   Personally, staying out of the comfort zone is a key thing to me. There is no learning in the comfort zone - you have to be outside it to learn. These things ensure just that!