Close Pass App

There are three two main problems with achieving a goal. First - you lose it, literally. You need to find a new direction or face the feeling of emptiness. Something that a person with compulsive behaviour like myself can't stand. Second, the results more often need to match the expectations. Everything you do is an experiment, and they tend to fail. It's ok. But if you invest a lot of time and effort, it can hurt.

Releasing the book after two years of work was an enormous thing. But let's be honest. I'm not a marketing person, and promotion is what I learn. I tried to reach out and shout, "Buy my book!". And there are some sales, but I want to see something else. Why? Because I start with "I want". I ask people to give me. Even if the book delivers, my message is a request.

Luckily, there are wiser people than me. And they opened my eyes to the fact that I must first give. I need to make people come to me and look into buying the book.

The best way to give something is to solve a problem. And the best way is to solve your problem. And it is even better to solve it as quickly as possible to test. If it is worth fixing, and it seems it was, at least from the initial reception.

For a long time, I had an idea about some software solutions that would help people report dangerous drivers. I thought about sophisticated spreadsheets for the reports, AI models finding phones on the videos or chatbots writing witness statements. All of that seems amazing, but requires a lot of work, time and investment.

I sat with a friend of mine. We ran a few ideas and quizzed him on how the AI could help me analyse close passes, for example. He quickly calculated the potential market, required effort and suggested I start simple. As simple as I can.

So I sat on one evening and wrote a tool that allows me to describe and calculate distances on a picture of a close pass. It worked nicely. I tested that using pics posted online and found issues with perspective. I handled that. I tested on a few more and found several UX flaws that made it frustrating to use. I got it, finally, after four evenings in total. I was happy, but what now?

image

I could just post it. Some may use it, but still, it wasn't immediately clear how it would help. I was also losing track of anyone who could use it, mostly because I couldn't track anyone without the cookie's consent (and I did not want to block anyone either).

So, I added simple subscription forms and cookie consent. You could use the tool, take a screenshot and forget. Or you could send me your email address and download a rendered image.

This way, in truly Dan Norris's way, I made my ready-to-market MVP in below one week, on evenings.

And it's there now.

I recorded a simple video that immediately showed the value and posted it. People are interested. It brings traction and looks promising. But what's most important is that it delivers value to anyone. Before they see links to my book and other offers, some of them may want to try it.