Introducing Follow In Steps

It all started with an unsalted dough. If you ever prepared a dough for a home-made pizza you know how important it is to salt it correctly. Without this essential condiment you will get people pushing you to keep trying instead of getting honest compliments. That’s what happened five years ago.

Following Recipes Are Not Easy

The first challenge was to keep Jamie Oliver’s cookbook open, preventing the pages to turn by the tension of the spine. I had to hold the pages with something heavy, spoiling my new book and hiding part of the content. While preparing the dish, I had to use a ruler to scroll down the text, so I wouldn’t get lost. Despite all these arrangements, I still skipped the step where it instructed to season it.

A while after that, I was blogging about something I made. It was technical, so the writing was very detailed, with instructions to build each part. By the middle of the text I connected the dots: I was writing a recipe (just like Jamie Oliver) for something I was knowledgeable about (just like Jamie Oliver).

Recipes can be written for everything, to teach people how to achieve short goals without the need to become an expert. The concept applies everywhere, from books to TV shows, all subjects covered. It is indeed common sense that steps are one of the most efficient techniques to get things done fast. But why did I skip the salt?

The Problem Was The Execution

Books, blog posts, YouTube videos, they all have good intentions. They want you to make something concrete, and you succeed most of the time, but not without some pain. The whole setup to keep the book open, the annoyance to find where you were in the blog post, the play, pause and rewinds to catch-up with videos. These are little distractions that affect the final outcome. While you need to focus on the task to get it right, you still have to go through the steps in parallel.

That’s clearly a problem to solve, but how?

Hold My Coffee

The solution was not that difficult. I sorted it out after some brainstorm sessions, a couple of family and friends feedback, and many nights of hacking, but the challenge was to make the idea sustainable and scalable over time. It took me 5 years to figure out a business model that is now live at followinsteps.com.

The idea is to surround steps with mechanisms to maximize the focus on the craft and minimize distractions with effective tracking features. The whole concept is not complete yet. We had to rewrite everything in a more efficient technology and redesign for simplicity (there were too many buttons at the beginning). We are glad to run some product development initiatives with key users, identifying gaps we never anticipated.

We are gradually pursuing our mission of making all steps easy to follow and materializing our vision of building a common ground of steps where people can start from to innovate faster.