Yep, this has been a pain for me as well. I'm in this weird limbo state right now where half the stuff is under my product email and half is under my personal. Thank goodness for credential managers!
Ugh I just launched my first project under my personal account and have been wondering if I should prioritize moving it - sounds like I've got my work cut out for me
I feel this is something that a lot of people say but ours is definitely over-designing and engineering the MVP.
As we have some bigger and more established competitors we went in with the mindset of we must at least match them (Feature and capability wise) and this has then made it difficult to find our differentiating feature.
focusing on how big the project could become without having launched yet. I wanted to launch only things that I believe had huge potential. When I started actually launched things, I discovered that you can never know beforehand and ideas you give no credit end up making a lot of money.
premature optimization.
spending too much time on meaningless details like name, domain extension, logo etc. These things don't count at the beginning plus a lot of projects will miserably fail so don't waste that time.
I share @louisswiss's sentiments on this one. Building things just for the sake of building them, without validating that I was building for a good enough reason.
As a developer first, it's easy to fall into the trap of trying to fix all of your problems with code. In reality, it's better to talk to people first to ensure that you're using your time effectively.
As a sidepreneur, I have been sidetracked by two other projects in the past few years, instead of focusing on the main app business. The idea was that I would diversify my efforts.
Considering that my app business has been growing steadily over the years and also that my free time is limited to 10-20 hours/week, I consider it a big mistake looking back. I could have sped up the app growth instead. Out of the 6.5 years on the app, I have lost ~1.5 years.
This is obviously very subjective and for someone else, going broad instead of deep might be the right strategy.
a) before I had confirmation from customers that it would really move the needle for them
b) before I literally couldn't handle doing it manually any more
If you do multiple side projects, don't use the same Stripe account for all of them - create a separate entity as soon as you start generating 'real' revenue.
Otherwise, good luck when it comes time to sell the project or handle anything tax related. 🤯
I agree with the seemingly unanimous points that people make that the biggest mistake is building something before there is actually a need.
However, for me (non-technical), it's not because I could just build it at the expense of my time. I thought that i was following best practices and doing customer validation, but in the end, I was skewed by confirmation bias. I was looking for people to say yes, so maybe interpreted encouragement and excitement as a "yes, I'd pay for that". and then it was me that ended up paying for contract development for something that wasn't necessarily a need. SMH.
As an extension of that, I wish that i had done some personal branding and had some list/audience to reach out to with a "launch". it's very hard to get momentum from a cold start!
Never focusing on one thing at a time and really pushing it one product. I've always had a problem with coming up with an idea and just building it out really quickly, but never going past the implementation stage to the sales and marketing stage.
With Link Reminder, I've really learned to stick my feet on the ground and really push it's adoption. I still get random ideas every day that I think could be super cool but I've learned to write it down on my task manager to revisit in a year.
I'm learning a lot on the sales and product side of things now, which is good, because you really can't build a business with just Engineering skills.
That's funny. I am the other way around. I am an engineer with no good product/marketing/sales skills. I am currently trying to learn the non engineering stuffs as much as I can. Can you recommend me some pointers? Especially coming up with an idea and build it up quickly?
On the implementation side of things, I have boilerplates that I've built for myself with the tech stack I've chosen and easily deploys to my infrastructure on AWS/GCP, so it's easy to quickly build an MVP.
On the idea side of things, I usually just talk to people at work a lot about random things. A lot of the time someone will say "wonder if there's an app for that" or "I'm oh man it's so annoying when". You kind of train yourself to listen to other people and try to solve their problems, then the ideas will come from externally.
That's what I do anyway, I think you just have to build out your own way of finding ideas, there really isn't a one-size fits all for this kind of thing. There are ways to validate though, which I really should be doing before I build out things.
Subscription management is important, reverse engineer your revenue (how many customers you need paying X to get Y per month), build your dream team as early as possible.
I echo @Luqa; worrying too much about details that are ultimately meaningless (at the start) will suck up a lot of time, and probably be thrown out or reworked anyway. It's difficult to parse out which of the details are "meaningless". If you let the internet be your guide, everything is of absolute, maximum importance.
In my case, I spent too much energy on things like over-indulgent SEO optimization, JSON-LD schema, og:tags, social media accounts, a blog, "perfect" design, super-premature A/B testing... and on and on. All the trappings of a "real" business... before I had a product that warranted the effort.
I still don't think I've truly embraced the "minimum" of MVP. I still have more to shed.
Another one thing I wish I would have avoided is the creeping doubt that leads to procrastination. I'd be a lot further along today, had I not fussed over pointless details; and had I not passed on a work session because I was unsure of what to do next, or how it might turn out.
Setting stuff up under my personal accounts. As I transfer things off and away from me, it's taken me ages to remove the direct connection with me.
Can you explain what has been a pain here? I've set up a few things like analytics under my personal account, just because it's only me right now.
Yep, this has been a pain for me as well. I'm in this weird limbo state right now where half the stuff is under my product email and half is under my personal. Thank goodness for credential managers!
Ugh I just launched my first project under my personal account and have been wondering if I should prioritize moving it - sounds like I've got my work cut out for me
I feel this is something that a lot of people say but ours is definitely over-designing and engineering the MVP.
As we have some bigger and more established competitors we went in with the mindset of we must at least match them (Feature and capability wise) and this has then made it difficult to find our differentiating feature.
I couldn't find "the one", I will give you three:
Repetitive stress injuries from working on a very non-ergonomic laptop (no mouse, no external monitor) as a DN.
I share @louisswiss's sentiments on this one. Building things just for the sake of building them, without validating that I was building for a good enough reason.
As a developer first, it's easy to fall into the trap of trying to fix all of your problems with code. In reality, it's better to talk to people first to ensure that you're using your time effectively.
I would have avoided letting things go dormant. Momentum is powerful. If you are making progress, keep that wheel spinning.
As a sidepreneur, I have been sidetracked by two other projects in the past few years, instead of focusing on the main app business. The idea was that I would diversify my efforts.
Considering that my app business has been growing steadily over the years and also that my free time is limited to 10-20 hours/week, I consider it a big mistake looking back. I could have sped up the app growth instead. Out of the 6.5 years on the app, I have lost ~1.5 years.
This is obviously very subjective and for someone else, going broad instead of deep might be the right strategy.
Vague answer, but simply building things...
a) before I had confirmation from customers that it would really move the needle for them
b) before I literally couldn't handle doing it manually any more
I share @rosiesherry's pain as well...
If you do multiple side projects, don't use the same Stripe account for all of them - create a separate entity as soon as you start generating 'real' revenue.
Otherwise, good luck when it comes time to sell the project or handle anything tax related. 🤯
Can you explain a bit more about this? I have a single "stripe login" but I have multiple "accounts" (according to the top left dropdown).
I have a Company account where I put a number of products in there, and if it starts getting revenue, I might pull them out into their own "account".
Is this what you're currently doing or am I doing it wrong?
"Otherwise, good luck when it comes time to handle anything tax related."
Why?
I have all my projects under the same stripe account and I never had problems with taxes. (I have an umbrella brand under which all my projects are).
You are obviously right about the selling part.
I agree with the seemingly unanimous points that people make that the biggest mistake is building something before there is actually a need.
However, for me (non-technical), it's not because I could just build it at the expense of my time. I thought that i was following best practices and doing customer validation, but in the end, I was skewed by confirmation bias. I was looking for people to say yes, so maybe interpreted encouragement and excitement as a "yes, I'd pay for that". and then it was me that ended up paying for contract development for something that wasn't necessarily a need. SMH.
As an extension of that, I wish that i had done some personal branding and had some list/audience to reach out to with a "launch". it's very hard to get momentum from a cold start!
Never focusing on one thing at a time and really pushing it one product. I've always had a problem with coming up with an idea and just building it out really quickly, but never going past the implementation stage to the sales and marketing stage.
With Link Reminder, I've really learned to stick my feet on the ground and really push it's adoption. I still get random ideas every day that I think could be super cool but I've learned to write it down on my task manager to revisit in a year.
I'm learning a lot on the sales and product side of things now, which is good, because you really can't build a business with just Engineering skills.
That's funny. I am the other way around. I am an engineer with no good product/marketing/sales skills. I am currently trying to learn the non engineering stuffs as much as I can. Can you recommend me some pointers? Especially coming up with an idea and build it up quickly?
On the implementation side of things, I have boilerplates that I've built for myself with the tech stack I've chosen and easily deploys to my infrastructure on AWS/GCP, so it's easy to quickly build an MVP.
On the idea side of things, I usually just talk to people at work a lot about random things. A lot of the time someone will say "wonder if there's an app for that" or "I'm oh man it's so annoying when". You kind of train yourself to listen to other people and try to solve their problems, then the ideas will come from externally.
That's what I do anyway, I think you just have to build out your own way of finding ideas, there really isn't a one-size fits all for this kind of thing. There are ways to validate though, which I really should be doing before I build out things.
Subscription management is important, reverse engineer your revenue (how many customers you need paying X to get Y per month), build your dream team as early as possible.
Overthinking and over complicating the product. I believe (now) simplicity is a confident strength.
I echo @Luqa; worrying too much about details that are ultimately meaningless (at the start) will suck up a lot of time, and probably be thrown out or reworked anyway. It's difficult to parse out which of the details are "meaningless". If you let the internet be your guide, everything is of absolute, maximum importance.
In my case, I spent too much energy on things like over-indulgent SEO optimization, JSON-LD schema, og:tags, social media accounts, a blog, "perfect" design, super-premature A/B testing... and on and on. All the trappings of a "real" business... before I had a product that warranted the effort.
I still don't think I've truly embraced the "minimum" of MVP. I still have more to shed.
Another one thing I wish I would have avoided is the creeping doubt that leads to procrastination. I'd be a lot further along today, had I not fussed over pointless details; and had I not passed on a work session because I was unsure of what to do next, or how it might turn out.
Sit down and work. On something. Anything.
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.