Don't Do What I Did - 8 Years Building In The Dark.
I spent 8 years happily building in the dark. I wholeheartedly regret it.
Sharing something near and dear to you is difficult. It's hard to expose yourself, especially on the internet. It's hard to reveal what you're working on, for the fear of being exposed as a fraud, or as being incompetent, or foolish, or desperate, or all of the above.
So I hid. I hid in the shadows and worked tirelessly on my little apps. I worked on a game. Then another game. Then I worked on a Chrome extension. I worked on a calendar app. I worked on a workout tracking app. I worked on a particle simulation tool. I worked on ANOTHER game. I worked on a color palette generator. I worked on a custom text editor. I worked on a note taking app. And the entire time, during my 8 year journey, I never once self promoted or tried really hard to share anything I made with the world.
I was happy with being introverted, with being lonely, and with keeping these projects to myself, because I was never really confident in the quality.
Something funny is that when you accept that whatever you're working on isn't going to be seen anytime soon, you treat it like it won't. You treat it like something that's not ready for public use. And you'll continue to treat it like that forever, because you never once thought to polish it up into something presentable to the world. Because you already accepted that it's not.
I've been working on a new project for 3 years now. I consider it my magnum opus. 8 days ago, though, I conducted my first ever usability test, by accident. I had always invited friends to try my apps, but never strangers. As I carefully watched, giving no instructions, this first time user uncovered problem after problem with the usability of my app, and after 15 minutes, I had a list of more than 20 critical issues that I recognized would need to be fixed if there was ever any hope of this gaining mass market traction.
And then, I had a realization. It wasn't user friendly, because I had never designed it to be. I had always planned for "V0.0" release "in two months". The first time I did that was, you guessed it, 3 years ago. And 3 years later, where is my project now? Still V0.0. Still zero daily active users, excluding me.
You can't just design in the dark forever. Product development doesn't work like that. Take it from someone who's been doing this for 8 years. At some point, you need to take the plunge and hand it to people. And, like I experienced during my first user test, once you hand it to people, they will break it. They will poke holes in it. They will undercover problems you never thought possible.
Regardless of how impressive my app looks at this point, it's pointless if it's not usable by anyone other than me.
If there's anything you take away from this experience of mine, take away this: You must design for your users, and your users don't include you. You're the founder. The developer. The designer. Anything but a user. If you use your own product, you are a user in name only, because you possess more familiarity and knowledge of your own product than any actual user ever will.
For three years, I built something that was comfortable and easy for me to use. For anyone else, there's not a chance in hell of ever picking it up and succeeding with it. My mistake was thinking I could build a great product in the dark and having it be great when I hand it to my first users. That's impossible.
Keeping the product away from the hands of others does the opposite of what you think it does. It prolongs the development cycle by delaying critical feedback and usability concerns. You must deliver that imperfect product. You must fully embrace the criticism and possible embarrassment that comes from it. And by doing so, you will gain the feedback necessary to make it less imperfect, and less embarrassing.
Software development is hard. Design is unintuitive. UX is frustrating. Great products are not great from the getgo. Rather, the iterative process of delivery, feedback, and improvement is what makes great products great. Every great company from AirBnB to PayPal to Apple has a story to tell of a time when their products were too ugly to even take a second glance at. Take inspiration from those stories, and think again about your ugly V0 product.
It's okay for V0 to be garbage. Don't be afraid to share it. Own up to it, and bring it into the world for everyone to see. Deliver it. Gather feedback on it. Test it. And then, iterate.
I can't accurately express in words how much progress I feel like I made on my app after that one usability test. Here's my project now. There are sure to be many remaining problems, but it's okay. It's time that I let the world see it and uncover those problems.
And a demonstration of what my personal workspace looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TirpqBL5txY
If you are like me, building in the dark because you're unsure about the quality of your work, don't be. Just ship it, and let the feedback that comes from it guide your next steps. Products don't die because the first five users think it sucks. They die because their makers give up on it.
Share your own V0 or V1 or V10 products in the comments!
Find me at:
https://www.youtube.com/@aster_jyk
https://twitter.com/aster_jyk
Yes, I made this mistake for years, too! I recently forced myself to launch my current WIP before it was ready, and I'm happy to say the world did not end. :) Now I can launch it again, and again.
https://turtlebased.com/