71–79 of 79 posts
I've been guilty in the past of putting lots of effort into building, tuning and polishing something which... well, nobody wanted Or that nobody was willing to pay for, anyway Or not enough to make it lucrative Or heck to not even put it in the general ballpark of being minimally sustainable. Totally changed my mindset since
Anyway I learned so much along the way and they say you have to spend thousands of hours to actually become successful in one area. Now I've built a project on 2/3 weeks. I give it a few weeks, then move to a new idea to find a gold mine and start the monetization.
You discovered why design comes before development in mature development organizations. Design, fundamentally, is a medium of communication. Creating an explainer video, creating a UI, and creating experiences are all communicating to your users how to interact with your software. Unless your users are also technical, (and sometimes even then,) if you don't know what you're going to say, starting off with implementin…
I'm a bit of a cowboy myself, but I can cobble good stuff together fairly quickly and make it well enough to last for years (electronic hardware).
In such work, I know that with a clearly visualised goal, development becomes a simple task.
It's surprisingly easy to build something that no one wants. This is because it's easy to build something that doesn't solve a real problem. For reasons that I still can't figure out, we're very good at fooling ourselves about what are real problems that people experience.
Now when I have a new idea, I force myself to dwell on the question, "What is the cheapest way I can validate that the problem I'm solving is real?" You did that with an ugly prototype and a video. That's quite cheap. Maybe you could've even done it with no product at all!
The way I think of this is validating the problem before investing any time in building a solution. It's surprisingly easy to build something that no one wants. This is because it's easy to build something that doesn't solve a real problem. For reasons that I still can't figure out, we're very good at fooling ourselves about what are real problems that people experience. Now when I have a new idea, I force myself to…
- Thats a good idea to sit on that question for a bit. Thank you for that
Best growth hacking thing to do now is to make an HN post about lesson learned and to make sure all the links are included. Like the OP. Later on it should be possible to make another HN post about the impact of the previous HN post on the sign up counts. Make sure to include the links there too.