Sharing Lessons Learned when working on your first Product

I would like to share with you a retrospective I made after about six months of work on my first product and to know your lessons learned during your first projects, if you want to share them. # What I built - An API that categorizes texts with up to 900+ topics. [1] - A website and a browser extension that automatically categorizes the articles you want to save in your reading list. [2] # Lessons Learned 1. Validate the idea before you start building an MVP. I started my way and developed at least 50% more than I should have. 2. Start building an audience early to make your MVP known and tested once it's ready. Building an audience takes time and, above all, consistency. As a consequence, you need to start it before or at most during the early developments. 3. Release the MVP early, let users try it, develop by solving their problems, iterate. Treat your first users as shareholders of your project and solve their problems to minimize the risk of creating something not useful. 4. The right tech stack allows you to develop and test quickly. You need to iterate fast on users' feedbacks. CI/CD helps a lot. 5. Knowing how to organize your work well and keep yourself motivated is essential for the completion of a side project. It worked well for me to plan each evening the tasks to do for the next day, keep an up-to-date backlog, give myself wide-ranging deadlines for important events (such as user tests and product launches) and do periodic retrospectives of what can be improved. I hope my experience will be useful to others. What lessons did you learn? Remember to also mention what you have built! 😄 [1] https://easytagger.ai [2] https://ebla.ai