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First time product makers, what was your biggest obstacle and how did you overcome it?
Your first product is always special. All the hard-work you have put and the struggles you had to go through, finally culminates into a tangible product that you are proud of. This question is a chance for everyone to learn from that experience and to hopefully prevent making some common mistakes. What did you struggle with the most - was it the team, design, the feature, customers, validation, marketing, scaling... ? and, what steps did you take that helped you to overcome it?
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Mindbreath
There were lots of obstacles on the way, putting constant efforts to serve the purpose of app with simplicity and sticking to the plan was the key.
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Non Coder
Bootstrapper
No network
Can you imagine the trouble that i faced. We are seeing the brightest side of things. But i got lot of mocking by saying idea man in reddit, literally broken from everywhere. But i got somehow a designer who design UI, and a front end developer from my LinkedIn.
Lessons learned:
A cofounder is not someone who meet at reddit or cofounders lab, if you find one you are way lucky. Search among your colleagues, friends, or networks like LinkedIn.
If you are searching for a cofounder, hire somebody and work with him or her for atleast 4 -6 months, if you perfectly sync with the person, pitch for partnering with you. Because partnership is like marriage, you should be careful before finalizing your partner.
@notanothervivek haha just noticed your website, remembered the slack now. Happy to see you here.
@sreekanth850 Laurent Ponthieu the Founder at Qinaps and I took 1 year to decide that I should join as a Co-founder. So you are bang on target. If agree on some basic stuff and the rest we learn and convince each other along the way !
@sreekanth850 Nicely said. Particularly the work chemistry between the founders is a make-break component and if not handled well, would land them in ugly mess.
It is absolutely impossible to start a product without calculating the unit economy. You can't skimp on the team and hire juniors. If the hypothesis cannot be tested in 2 weeks, then you should not spend money and time on its verification.
I would say test, test and test. Some time ago, I made the mistake of closing my room (way of talking as I was in coworking spaces) and developing something for months without testing or asking for feedback... and sometimes without even knowing who I'm developing this for.
So I'd suggest to define your target first and start talking to them before developing anything.
The other issue is the team... surround yourself by people who will lift you up and who you could trust. If you can't find them then sometimes it's better to work on a project by yourself (or with a smaller team).
The biggest obstacle is trying to figure out how exactly to do everything for the first time all at once. Also figuring out all the legal stuff is hard.
@jack_davis7 I totally agree with that. You gotta learn a lot of new things for the first time which is exhausting and exciting at the same time. Not to mention the legal stuff 😅
@jack_davis7 Totally agree with you on this. The experience of finding the right way to fulfill requirements itself is a major challenge.
The problem was to develop the string system for our guitar. We decided firstly to replace strings with butoons to provide musicians with an easy-to-play instrument, but button neck is not suitable for those who are used to strings and for those wgo want to get real guitar experience. Replacing buttons with strings meant making the instrument more difficult to play for people with hand injuries and disabilities, so after several attempts we managed to make easy-to-clamp strings using special sensors to pick the position of fingers on the neck
@notanothervivek It's a bit difficult to be innovative in music tech, where there are lots of different solutions for almost all the musicians. But we firstly focused on people with disabilities, so we tried to find a way to make their life better and give them a chance to play music. Now we have decided to make our product even more interesting for all the musicians and more suitable for beginners, and it is such an interest for many musicians all over the world, that we are surprised
so far the most difficult has been marketing and growth, and splitting time between development and getting traction. we were able to convert people manually but it's been extremely manual.
would be curious to learn from others what did they do to convert people early stages (100-1000). i have been reading around and not quite sure how to really do zero marketing and gain traction (kudos to them but very little for me to learn from).