From abandoned project to profitable product
I've released the second interview on QuickTalks.io featuring Razvan Ilin the creator of ChartBrew. You can watch the full interview here.
Find below some take-aways 👇
🤓 About his first product:
"I launched it in beta, sent some emails and I had some of my friends using it, but I never got to the stage where I was comfortable with it to launch it to everybody and support it... so I abandoned it shortly after."
🚀 Lessons learned from launches:
"95% of the time you will not get the expected results from your launch. Once I reached the top one on HackerNews... The bad part is that somehow my sign up stopped working and it was at night so I missed tons of users 😓"
🤕 On abandoning projects
"I've had at least two projects that I abandoned and a year later, someone built them and made tons of money out of them 😅 The idea was right, you just have to put more to it than just developing features."
🧾 Marketing as a developer:
"Technical people get the energy from writing features or writing code and the other processes like marketing, sales, and user research drain our energy. I gradually started doing some market analysis and researching my target audience."
📢 Advice
"Sticking to something is one of the hardest things to do. There are makers doing 12 startups in 12 months... that's valid when you don't have anything to work on but I think it's best to stick to something. Most of the time is going to take at least a year."
You can watch the full interview here or you can watch some clips on the Youtube channel:
Definitely feel this. I built a little "debate" platform, shut it down, and 3 months later saw Kialo launched the same tool (but prettier).
But also happy that I had practically abandoned Brisa Videos, but a little interest from a fellow IHer led to refactoring, rebranding, and launching as Vidds.co.
I hate that feeling of not knowing whether something I built isn't good enough, or if I'm just not trying hard enough to get it in front of people! And, of course, there's always the 3rd thought: Maybe the product is good enough, it's just entirely too difficult to reach the audience (cost, advertising, etc).
And don't forget the most important bit: do you enjoy working on the project? From what I see around me, successful products are also the ones where the founders enjoy the space their product is in and the problem they're solving.
Yeah, definitely! I think they all get to be a bit of a grind for me at some point, mostly because there aren't any users.
But I can't imagine what it'd be like having tons of users while not enjoying the space/project! Sounds miserable haha