And We’re Back – ConceptComet is born

Three years ago, I started on a question to build 12 products in 12 months. I started with something physical – I don’t really know why at this point – and I created a startup-themed bookmarks company called InspireMarks. I designed, printed, and sold my old bookmarks. I got them into one local Boston bookstore when COVID-19 struck. Most bookstores started to struggle and Inspiremarks failed at online sales. Over the course of the next few months, grad school became a lot, I got divorced, and ultimately left Boston.

Since then, I moved to San Diego, moved to Austin, finished grad school at Harvard, our startup Fincura was acquired, and moved back to San Diego. It’s been two years since the acquisition and I’m back in the lab. I’m back on a quest to create 12 products in 12 months.

It’s been a while since I’ve exercised this muscle, but here we are.

When did I decide I was going to do this again? I think around Thanksgiving. Over the past two months, I got an accountability coach, downloaded and paid for a social media blocker, and generally got more serious about creating products again. I started reaching out to validate business ideas, and tinkering and ultimately found Pegasus – which is a Django boilerplate that has built-in modules to help speed up application development.

I found myself using OpenAI to help ideate interesting product names and then checking to see which domain names were available. I did this a number of times before deciding to automate this process – that is when ConceptComet was born.

Is the website ugly? Yes. Does it do everything I want it to? No. Is there any monetization whatsoever? No. But I like to launch when something isn’t perfect and collect feedback.

Month 1 down. I’m going to improve ConceptComet based on what I want to see and based on feedback that comes in, but it’s time to start thinking about Month 2.

Fun fact – ConceptComet was named by using ConceptComet!