I’m going to use this blog to journal about building Zarlu, Inc.
Because it’s a journal, some posts may contradict earlier ones. That’s fine. I believe in strong opinions, loosely held. If I learn something, I’d rather change my mind than pretend I was right all along.
This week I learned I started on the wrong problem.
I just finished my first week working full-time on Zarlu. Most of my energy went into building automations and demos. That work is fun. It also feels productive. But it is not the most important thing right now.
The most important thing is getting in front of potential users.
For Clinical Rota, that means I need to get on the phone or in the room with five potential customers. Not someday. Now. It’s one thing to build something that seems useful. It’s another to hear, in ten minutes of conversation, what actually makes someone’s job harder, what they hate about the current tools, and what they would pay to fix.
I knew this already, at least in theory. But knowing something in theory is not the same as acting on it. My default instinct is to build. Over the weekend I had to step back and ask what matters most for the business at this stage.
The answer was not more product work.
The answer was warm leads.
So that is the job now. If you work in healthcare and deal with shift scheduling, I’d love to talk. I want to understand what is broken, what is annoying, and where existing tools fall short.
There’s an irony here. I bought zarlu.com around 2013 because I wanted to build something related to scheduling. More than a decade later, I’m back in the same territory, and the problem still looks surprisingly unsolved.
Part of what pushed me to see this clearly was attending a Bootstrappers Breakfast in Mountain View this past Friday. Sometimes you need someone else to tell you the obvious thing you were avoiding. That happened to me.
You can even see the confusion in my last post about building automations. I was doing work, but I was not doing the right work.
Now I have more clarity.
My job is to build relationships with people in healthcare, understand their scheduling problems, and find out whether my ideas solve a painful enough problem that someone will pay for them.
That comes before everything else.
John