We Scaled a $73M Product — You’re Skipping This PRD Step for Planning Projects

So, you got a new project coming up. I'm going to teach you how I approach these things. I was a product manager for six years, also a UX designer. I've been building stuff since I was like 14. I'm 32 now. And I've built a lot of SAS. So, we're going to walk through the highle stuff. If you want to go deeper, you can check out my main channel, which is this one. And every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I'll have little snippets of this of like how I'm building. So you'll be able to see each one get planned, processed, and released. And if you want the full thing, then you can go buy it basically in our community. So let's talk about it. How to plan a new project, right? So you always start with, okay, this is new or are we going 0 to one or one to 1.10? So like 1.5 1.6. But in this case, this is like totally brand spanking new. And I used to do things the wrong way where it's just ooh I had this idea and it's so great and it's really unshaped. Basically like a block of marble and I come in here and I just immediately try to jump to code. And then the better version of that would be this is like version zero. Don't do that. Then one level up from that would be, "Ooh, I have the new idea and let me actually jump into design, start drawing it." But that's still not that great because you want to take that idea and you want to basically poke a bunch of holes in it. So the idea of it is you want to shape it up and that is from a popular framework from DHH the goat behind Ruby on Rails as well as 37 Signals base camp. They've been printing money since the '9s. The idea being that you would go and you'd shape the idea up so that it looks a little bit better than just this rough piece of marble that is ugly. How do we make them look better? But they do a bunch of exercise around the actual idea before you jump into code and way before code. But yeah, because why why do you do this? If you can vibe code it, why wouldn't you do this? Because you could waste a lot of time vibe coding even if it is faster. And there's a nice way of thinking about this. As a PM, I had to know all these little things because time is money. Engineers are expensive. paying 250 a year per engineer and you got a team of eight of them. Do the math. Quick 2 millie. Let's say you burn a quarter. Yeah, I don't do public math, but it's a lot of money. So, your cost, then you have time. Especially in software dev, like basically if you make an error and you get to here and you've spent all this time and it's getting up to here, but then you catch it and we'll say this is over a couple weeks. So, week one, two, week three, week four. If you catch something in week three, that sucks. Right now, in AI world, you might catch it on day three. Might catch it like right here, but still, you want to just not have that many gayas. You will inevitably hit some things along the way, but you want to reduce it as much as possible. The way you do that is plan. A lot of people just think of PRD, but there's more to it. So, when I'm planning a new project, I basically just make a bunch of lists. So, I'm thinking about product, the thing, and I'm also thinking about distribution. How I'm going to get this thing out? There's other ways of trying to think about how the product has built-in distribution. That's a good way to think. In our case, there's product distribution, there's a design vibe. So, if it has a front end, then I want to have some sort of vibe to it. That's just by yanking screenshots. And then what's the offer? Like you're doing this to ultimately provide a good or a service. So I'm defining that. And so me, I've started jumping into this and it's all because I was shaping this idea up and I'm like, start with why. And my idea answers a problem that my viewers are having. So I have a lot of people watch this YouTube channel. I have a small community. It's like low ticket and they get a lot of questions. I answer the same question like 100 times. But across the new channel which is at 1405, let's see how many people are we hitting. Okay, let's say over a month we have close to 30k views, right? So 30k touches. And then on the other channel, oops. It's funny when you're holding this little pen that you can sometimes you get struck when you're typing. But let's say 30k views on that channel over the month, 40k here. So 70,000 touches. And if you have 70,000 touches, there's maybe 5% of people who are questioning something actually comment. But then if I go into my comments and I just clear that I haven't responded and I typed in PRD, you're going to see a lot of them. Like this is just going to keep going and going and going and going. So this is what you call market pull. There's clearly people that want to learn about product requirement documents. But inevitably, even if they get this one little prompt, then they go and they use it and they're like, I didn't this guy's prompt sucks. You're like, no, it's cuz you have an incomplete picture. And so if I show you what we're learning in our school, we're on school right now. I know it's cringe, but there's a lot of value in there. If I go into our last marketing or sorry coding workshop which is Friday got a lot of G's in there. G as in like the seventh letter of the alphabet as in like good people. If you look at this PRD is just one little part of building the product. And so a lot of people they haven't built product right. I've built a lot of them. And so this process is just mapping to what's already existed. So if I go to hacker noon and I look at my old profile, you can see that like back in 2018, I was writing about this stuff. There's me. I'm in this picture. So with that experience, you kind of learn like how to do it. Especially since we scaled our company to 73 mil and I was a VP of product and wrote about this at length where it's like we're fighting Uber and Door Dash and you have to get good at this. I get all these questions, very qualified. I launched a program before around this, but I felt so cringe that I pulled it and I'm like, I should have never pulled this. This could be paying a mortgage. I have market poll because people go, they ask for that and then they join the community and they just want to ask again because they hit a wall. So now I have my why. Now, the what is basically a nine video master class on how to take the PRD prompt that I've given out and actually get the full story behind it. Just because you have that doesn't mean you're going to make something good because it's just this one part. So when I look at this, I know that most this basically this is a product for a newbie that has not worked on a team or it's a product for someone who's not a product manager that wants to scale that part up because basically anyone that's building products right now using AI needs product skills, product chops and luckily I can give them the chops. So we'll be covering ideation all this stuff basically these first five what we'll be covering and then how it carries over into the rest and then we can decide later like if people want designy stuff like I'll give like an overview on it but so that's the why that's the what now we figure out the how. So to get super meta what we're 8 minutes in and I've covered a couple things. I've covered this idea of the cost. I've covered this idea of shaping something up. I've covered the what and the how. Sorry, the why and the how, which are the really important ones. So, wait, is it? It's a course. I'm going to get a Lamborghini from this course. Course. I'm going to get a course tattooed right here. Call me a course, bro. Comment below what color Lambo I should get from Yeah, it's a course. Get over it. And then we have the why, right? So, market pull in the form of a gazillion comments and people trying to scratch the itch on Discord. So, then I look at the offer and this is just literally everyone always asks about pricing. You just make it up, right? You make it up with some education. So, I might go and look and see like what other people are charging. I charged 200 bucks for the same thing before. So I charge I think the offer I did was like 200 and I sold like however much equal 20k. So like 100 of them maybe. Yeah. And so that included like 20 25 vids which I actually uploaded and they're still relevant today. That's the beauty of product. None of it really changes except for the tools. Like the concepts from 5 years ago don't change. And so if you do join the school it's half off right now. Yeah. plug, you'll see that it's all in here. So, I made this and it was like, what is product strategy? Think how to think like one, what's good and bad product strategy? How you're going to deal with failure? Cuz like you're just reframing it as learning. There's me with my like super bro go get an entrepreneur thing when I was not an entrepreneur, now I am one. The tool set tracking how to like model stuff. I think this is one that like AI just can't do. Like I don't trust in a spreadsheet. So, modeling, getting decent with design, speedrunning with design, how to use Slack normally, how to work with people remote, how to use notion as a home base, all this stuff. I guess this is now a sales pitch for this product. This one's included inside of this other stuff, but I'm going to take the one I'm making that I'm talking about in this video and move it outside here and then discount it. Cohorts, metric, blah blah blah. I think a lot of people this is overwhelming cuz it's like literally all the job of product management and the 200 people who bought it loved it which is great but in our case we want to make this like for vibe coders/coders so you can omit things and so now I look and I'm like okay on the product side I'm going to do a couple things I will breadboard it what's breadboarding shape up methodology going in here and this is what I base a lot of my stuff on. Go read this. It's basically like you try to figure out this. So, it's an embedded sketch where breadboarding is taken from mechanical engineering or something, but you basically draw what the name of the screen is or the affordance and then the things that are going to be on it and then you draw an arrow of where it goes. So, in this case, this is a dashboard. You have a go to form that takes you to a form. You have send form link change from settings and then this is a new screen with all the things and a thank you and then below you'd see some fat sketches and you keep it fat on purpose because you don't want to get too detailed now. So what I'd do is I'd go and I' breadboard it. I figure out what the heck is this thing gonna do? And then I'd ask myself this question. Okay. Am I going to make this a part of a an existing product or is it going to be new? So, in my case, it's hybrid or it's actually I am going to breadboard it for sure. I'm not going to do this here. This will be the next video. But on my existing setup thing, it's a it's a yes because I have a lot of distribution channels. So, I'm like wondering, do I do this or do I not? This one's up in the air. The libraries, what are the things that I'm going to use? So in my case, I'm just going to start doing inline on this because I don't need to make a dock just to make a dock, right? I'm just trying to answer these questions for myself if I can get the pen to work. So on libraries that incluses includes stack. So I'm thinking about the architecture already. I'm like, okay, like we're going to have to have storage for the videos, right? So where do I want to put those? Do I want to do what would be simple? Probably like superbase. can use super basease. And that is for both. Actually, let me make this even easier. There's going to be a couple things that I need in here. I'm going to need some sort of web framework. I'm going to need soup storage. I don't need O. I need payments. I'm going to need a database, which is different than storage. Storage is for files, media, think like the videos. I'm going to need database. What else would I need for this? This is when I can start answering questions about what it's going to look like. I'm like, okay, what's on here? Do I need search? No. Do I need an account? No, because it's a single product. Just gonna kick them out to a video player. probably need that might be it. Yeah, that should be pretty simple. So, I just go through these, right? And this is the process. If I made a video of this whole thing, it would take me like hour and a half just like really dial it in, like scaffold the project. Then I'm going to answer the question of, okay, based on the stuff that I've thought about, am I building this or am I buying this? Definitely building it. Why? Cuz I've used all of them and they suck. shout out. What's it called? Teach. Teachable. Oh my god. So bad. Same thing with W. Wop's really confusing to me, but I'm going to use it as a distribution means. So yeah, build one's done. And then I write a pitch. So this is all like way before PRD. And that's why I'm saying like everyone's, "Oh my gosh, I need the PRD." They're like scratching their neck. Pitch just as a high level. was part of that program, but it's a pitch. You You should just go read that book that I pulled up. Pitch has a couple things. You narrow the problem, which we kind of did before, one to two sentences. Oh man, I hit the page down on my keyboard. Didn't work. So, you cover this. You cover the solution. Solution. you cover the basically rabbit holes. So, what are areas that you are aware of that could be problematic? Call them out. Hopefully, there's none. But if you're in a big code base, there's definitely you do a time box. And this is not for the LLM. This is for you. And I've made the mistake thinking like, oh, because I have AI, like I don't need to do this. No, this is for your own competence. This isn't for your own like sanity frankly. It's like, okay, what's my time box? And when you have the time box, it plays into the solution, right? So, I probably should just follow the book because I you guys are watching this video to learn. So, to make it easier, scoot that up. Okay, that was a good job. You guys like these skills? Pretty skillful. because we are creating a constraint and the constraint now will drive progress because our solution must fit within the time box and the time box is the bet size. So, how much time are you willing to bet that this thing is going to work? Bet. It's like a Gen Z term. You never catch me saying bet. I'm like on the cusp of Gen Z and I'm a millennial, bro. So anyways, you have the rebels and then finally you have no goes and I'm just going to write iOS, right? This is like an obvious one. We're not going to do the app, but yeah, I'd go and I'd write this pitch. Other things just to go through, I'd go through the distribution. So like how is this thing going to get out there? Is there some way that I can make this product le where it's I don't know someone buys it and there's like a give one get half off or something or you can buy it in bulk for enterprises because we already have that in our school where it's oh I'm sharing account is that cool? I'm like yeah no it's not because I'm not running a charity. Then you have YouTube for me. discounted school. My website I vibe with AAI the prdcourse.com. Boom. Bought that. Twitter PSO. Because SEO is like a six-month game. But yeah, proud owner. Then I go through the design vibe. Then I'm just thinking, okay, what looks good? This looks pretty good. I can make this. All right. So for my time box, we're going to be crazy. We're going to say where the heck is time box. Tonight. Yeah. Flex on them. It's 6:54 p.m. It'll be done tonight. So, that'll obviously dictate what I need to do. Other design vibes. Oh, am I going to try to like flex on people about moms? Probably not. Am I going to make this inliner? Probably. But how about all that? This thing. Maybe there'll be like a preview. So from the highest level, that's how I kick off and ideate around new projects. This is all way before PRD. PRD will be next. That's when I'm taking this stuff that I have here. I'm bouncing it around the washing machine that is an LLM cuz they are a washing machine. Like they will take something if it's not formed and they'll try to do this thing. They'll be like, "Wow, we did it." And if you don't know better, then you're like, "Yeah, that's it." And then I see this all the time with our members. They're like, "It told me so confidently that this is the way to do it." And I'm like, "It told you so confidently that this is absolutely river trash." So like the video if you like river trash. I'm waiting. Come on. You don't like river trash. But like the video still cuz that made you laugh, I think. and subscribe to the channel so that you can see me make this and then inevitably maybe you'll buy this. I don't know. Comment below if you like marble. Oh man. All right. Half off, of course, all the plugs. Hope you guys liked this video. It was helpful and I'll see you in the next one.