Does it MakeSense? Part 1: Racking the shotgun

2026, I decided to dedicate my summers to a software startup. It’s called MakeSense. My intention with this project was to gain entrepreneurship experience, alongside establishing an income source .

Through this series of posts, I intend to take you on a ride from ideation, to development, to marketing, and to the future. I won’t use any LLM for boosting reach here, just the unedited tale. Therefore, pardon any mistakes I might make.

Before I begin, I want to highlight the current state of this project: 20 days since release, we have 1 user. No subscriber. Instagram with 61 posts and 9 followers. By traditional means, this is a “failure” till now. But, I have faith in the idea and will see it to the bitter end. Lets start with how I chose the idea.

Racking the shotgun: Choosing an idea

I learned about this technique from Peter Thiel's “80/20 of Sales and Marketing”. If I write 100 ideas, only 20 of them will be worth pursuing. The skill lies in identifying which 20 they are. Following a similar logic, I wrote down 10 ideas I would want to work on.

I didn’t want a product that had no soul, meaning solving a pain point I knew nothing about. Therefore, the criteria for choosing these ideas was that they need to have a piece of me. By that, I mean it should be something I am uniquely suited to solve thanks to my experience in other fields. Hence, I wrote the initial 10.

Narrowing Down

The next step was narrowing down one idea among these ten. I wanted a platform where I can get customer feedback in a measurable metrics. The perfect place for this were ads. I chose meta ads because of their extensive reach and sheer user base. I set up one ad for each idea. To make sure no other factor other than the idea was at play, the visuals were almost identical, only difference was the idea itself. The attached link took the viewer to a form to register their interest. This form filled a google sheet of leads.

Then I ran the ad campaign for around 3 days, which in hindsight should have had ran for atleast a week. The metrics I used were number of leads, CPL and unique outbound CTR. I spend 1000 ruppee on this campaign.

The result was one clear standout winner that got 4X more leads than the average and 3X more than the second best. It was “Mochi” which was advertised as a learning app that converts what you want to learn to what you already understand. A concept mapping system. For ex- learning calculus in terms of Pokemon.