Startups: Cultivating Success Through the Seeds of Feedback

You have an idea and you started working it. Months pass and you start to visualize it. After working on it for almost a year, you fall in-love with it. IT becomes a relationship and relationships are ‘complicated’. After being involved in multiple startups and building a few, one of the mistakes that took me a while to realize is that I was always delaying my ‘launch’ or ‘the time that I start marketing or promoting’. I was constantly adding features that could be avoided and with no clue if someone will actually use them. I have built multiple web-applications from fitness related to a social media platform. I always put a lot of effort in making the app look good even though my front-end skills were not my specialty. I also always found myself overthinking basic functionalities and over complicating basic features that weren’t supposed to be complicated. After working on multiple startups, and with the explosion of AI, I decided to create a SaaS or web-application builder and launch as soon as I have the basic functionalities working. I wanted to the app to create a landing page from a single prompt, and allow users to create custom tasks, get quotes and pay a one-time fee for them. These tasks will be implemented by a software engineer on top of their generated landing page. They can also host this website by adding their domain. I worked on those features for almost a year and decided to launch. The difference this time is that I had a lot incomplete scenarios such as: - No profile pages. - No payment or invoice page. - No history. - All the projects on one page. - No filters. You could only add very few options of sections in the web-editor. You couldn’t change the header or footer in the generated website. No clear business model. I built what is known as an MVP or a minimum viable product. Only the basics! It was time to validate the idea and check if anyone would actually use such a system. I followed different organic marketing techniques such as social media, blogs, SEO and launching on different online platforms. My target was to try and get at least one client and then I would uplift all the platform and make it crispy. I put more effort in marketing rather than building unnecessary features that probably not one of the early clients would use or require. Even though I currently have multiple clients on the platform, only 1 or 2 have probably made an effort in filling in profile information. I learned a lot from my clients and knew what THEY WANTED and what would HELP THEM in making their web-app building journey a lot more efficient. Now PagePalooza.com is a SaaS builder where you generate a landing page and customize it using a standard web-editor. Each project has its own Custom Task Management dashboard with tracking, payments and discussing features with the developer about each task all in-app. The model was changed to allow users to scale at their own pace and create multiple tasks and pay for each when they are ready. This way the platform could be used with all founders with any budget. I also added some quick plugins such a simple ecommerce system, blogs and subscriptions. Always start marketing your product as soon as you have something working. Work on the main features first and start testing them in the market. Ask for feedback and make the necessary adjustments. Keep doing that until you believe that you truly have a gem that is generating income. Remember, there are always rooms and hallways of improvement, but not all improvements might have an impact if you are the only one that think they will. What do you think of this strategy? Tell me your story!