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I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

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Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#22
post #21

Ah Riot.js, it was like Vue before Vue, yet it never took off for some reason, and it had component templates with locally scoped JS and CSS. I remember mentioning it to a few fellow devs when they were hyping up Vue and nobody ever even heard about it.

Did you also tell them about “server side rendering” capabilities of PHP?

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#23
post #21

Ah Riot.js, it was like Vue before Vue, yet it never took off for some reason, and it had component templates with locally scoped JS and CSS. I remember mentioning it to a few fellow devs when they were hyping up Vue and nobody ever even heard about it.

Did you also tell them about “server side rendering” capabilities of PHP?

I remember this uncanny feeling when I started reading about a new thing in JS frameworks called "file based routing", coming from PHP it was, wait, didn't we just come from this to proper routing, and now this is a feature again.

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mistakenly convince ourselves that if I add one more feature, Even non-technical founders make this error. Everyone wants to believe that "just one more feature" is the difference between make and break. In my experience reducing features is better to begin with.

>In my experience reducing features is better to begin with. This is right approach. Lean. If you don’t have PMF, reduce your features until you find it. Pivot. Maybe pivot again. Eventually you’ll find a market to serve. Just don’t fall into the sunken cost fallacy. Time box your market exploration.

How do you mark the difference between pivoting and adding new features?

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#25
i've been making websites since 2000. i've seen the internet change and made couple of projects during my life, none took off. as time went, i realized this golden era of online businesses is long gone and everything has been monopolized and bought out by the big tech companies and that money for ads is what matters the most these days. right now i am finalizing my last project that i will ever make, for this reason. it will be 2.5 years of work in march, when i will be releasing it. the only reason i am going for it and i stuck with working on it full-time this whole time is because it is a type of business where customers will come on their own and will want to use it because it provides them with a new sales channel so competition is actually good for them. it flips the usual business model on its head. otherwise i would have quit a long time ago. my hopes up to get it going this year and make 1M in sales next year and hope to be able to focus on growing it for many years to come.

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#26

Spent last year working on a side project and assumed I would need this and that in order to launch. But after it was ready to launch, I found out there was no product market fit. I have known about the importance of quickly finding out pmf but still made the mistakes. knowing != doing. We just love building stuff and mistakenly convince ourselves that if I add one more feature, this thing would be ready for launch a…

It’s a good lesson. We found PMF with a shared google sheet and a bit of data processing behind the scenes. The level of polish I’d come to expect as an engineer at an enterprise company was astronomically higher than what was actually needed for our customers to give us their dollars.

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In my experience reducing features is better to begin with. This is right approach. Lean. If you don’t have PMF, reduce your features until you find it. Pivot. Maybe pivot again. Eventually you’ll find a market to serve. Just don’t fall into the sunken cost fallacy. Time box your market exploration.

How do you mark the difference between pivoting and adding new features?

As a freelance back-end developer with various co-founding experience this question speaks to me. I think it's all a matter of perspective.

Looking at it from a development perspective the two can mean the same thing: we pivot and so we need to add new features.

However, in my experience the key is to look at pivoting from a non-development perspective. As mentioned in parent comments you pivot to find a product market fit. That entails finding your audience and the problem you're solving for them. Those questions do not require a product, but a human understanding. Questions like 'is it actually a problem they need solving, or a slight convenience?' and 'how are they solving their problem without my product?'.

By pivoting quickly in that space you don't get bogged down by technical issues or challenges that don't even matter, and the real solution might be a week's worth of time.

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#28

i've been making websites since 2000. i've seen the internet change and made couple of projects during my life, none took off. as time went, i realized this golden era of online businesses is long gone and everything has been monopolized and bought out by the big tech companies and that money for ads is what matters the most these days. right now i am finalizing my last project that i will ever make, for this reason.…

Interesting. Link?

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#29
How do you guys get funding to build things for such a long time? Rent, food and health insurance in my area costs $50k per year. If feels I have no choice but to earn a salary.

Dropping a quarter of a mil on an app that might not pan out seems out of the question.

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#30

Spent last year working on a side project and assumed I would need this and that in order to launch. But after it was ready to launch, I found out there was no product market fit. I have known about the importance of quickly finding out pmf but still made the mistakes. knowing != doing. We just love building stuff and mistakenly convince ourselves that if I add one more feature, this thing would be ready for launch a…

Wise words man
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