urbanredneck
New member
(reposting this without any links, apologies to the @momoftwoteens-ModTeam for the last one!)
Over the last 5 weeks, my wife and I (both swe's) decided to start a new business in the creator niche since I'm a creator and I have a lot of experience in the industry.
I've previously bootstrapped a SaaS in a different niche over the past 4 years which gave me a lot of experience when it comes to building scalable products, and what tech stack to use.
Here's a list of 3 mistakes I made that I would change for the future, during this building process.
We didn't keep up with talking to people.
At the start, we knew we wanted to build something that helped bridge the gap between marketers and creators, but we didn't know exactly what pain point to tackle.
We ended up speaking to around 10 people and isolating one problem: it's hard for brands to find the right influencers.
With that in mind, we scoped out what was possible via social media APIs and started building.
We finished 5 weeks later, and we realized where we ended up with a bit far from the feedback we had gotten. We got so far into the weeds of what was technically possible, we almost had no idea of what was realistically useful.
I wish we kept up with outreaching to 5-10 people per day, just to stay grounded in what people were looking for. It also would have helped when we launched.
60% of the people we chatted with before building agreed to have a demo call once we finished the MVP.
If we had continued outreach while building our MVP, with that %, we could have had far more eyes on our initial demo.
Don't forget about the customer as soon as you start building!
We let tech dictate priorities.
We launched with 3 different main features, as to try and cast a wide net on usefulness hoping at least one of them would be close to some semblance of PMF.
However, the thing people actually ended up using, we probably could have built in as little as 2 weeks.
Now, of course we couldn't have known that while building, but a lot of our time did get siphoned into the never-ending loop of seeing what our tech was capable of, having some random idea of what we should do, and spending 3 days building it out.
Next time, I would spend more time on validation, come up with a very simple MVP that focuses on one feature, and take that to market. We can always add features on later, but there's never too soon of a time to actually launch.
We weren't embarrassed enough by the launch.
I'm no UX designer, and it shows in my code. I do however, know how to use Figma. I decided, once we finished the actual functionality of the site, to spend 2 weeks creating a Figma and sprucing the site up to look "presentable".
Having the site be responsive is one thing - but spending a week on a design system, color scheme, standard header widths and paddings, is not ideal.
Will this help in the long run? Absolutely - our UI is completely streamlined and it's super easy to build on for future features.
Could we have done without it? Yes.
So yeah I'm not 100% sure on this one, but I feel like we could have launched at least a week sooner if I didn't insist on things being so "perfect" (which it didn't turn out to be anyways lmao).
3 Mistakes I made while coding our MVP
Over the last 5 weeks, my wife and I (both swe's) decided to start a new business in the creator niche since I'm a creator and I have a lot of experience in the industry.
I've previously bootstrapped a SaaS in a different niche over the past 4 years which gave me a lot of experience when it comes to building scalable products, and what tech stack to use.
Here's a list of 3 mistakes I made that I would change for the future, during this building process.
Mistake #1
We didn't keep up with talking to people.
At the start, we knew we wanted to build something that helped bridge the gap between marketers and creators, but we didn't know exactly what pain point to tackle.
We ended up speaking to around 10 people and isolating one problem: it's hard for brands to find the right influencers.
With that in mind, we scoped out what was possible via social media APIs and started building.
We finished 5 weeks later, and we realized where we ended up with a bit far from the feedback we had gotten. We got so far into the weeds of what was technically possible, we almost had no idea of what was realistically useful.
I wish we kept up with outreaching to 5-10 people per day, just to stay grounded in what people were looking for. It also would have helped when we launched.
60% of the people we chatted with before building agreed to have a demo call once we finished the MVP.
If we had continued outreach while building our MVP, with that %, we could have had far more eyes on our initial demo.
Don't forget about the customer as soon as you start building!
Mistake #2
We let tech dictate priorities.
We launched with 3 different main features, as to try and cast a wide net on usefulness hoping at least one of them would be close to some semblance of PMF.
However, the thing people actually ended up using, we probably could have built in as little as 2 weeks.
Now, of course we couldn't have known that while building, but a lot of our time did get siphoned into the never-ending loop of seeing what our tech was capable of, having some random idea of what we should do, and spending 3 days building it out.
Next time, I would spend more time on validation, come up with a very simple MVP that focuses on one feature, and take that to market. We can always add features on later, but there's never too soon of a time to actually launch.
Mistake #3
We weren't embarrassed enough by the launch.
I'm no UX designer, and it shows in my code. I do however, know how to use Figma. I decided, once we finished the actual functionality of the site, to spend 2 weeks creating a Figma and sprucing the site up to look "presentable".
Having the site be responsive is one thing - but spending a week on a design system, color scheme, standard header widths and paddings, is not ideal.
Will this help in the long run? Absolutely - our UI is completely streamlined and it's super easy to build on for future features.
Could we have done without it? Yes.
So yeah I'm not 100% sure on this one, but I feel like we could have launched at least a week sooner if I didn't insist on things being so "perfect" (which it didn't turn out to be anyways lmao).
on the launch.