How I Made £150k While Validating the Idea for my App

It takes creative minds to develop software, there’s no getting around that. Beginners and those who are old hands at the work face plenty of challenges while developing all types of software. The process is complex and there are many challenges that must be overcome.
Here's a little bit of my history to illustrate. Maybe this will resonate with you and the challenges you’re currently facing in your software development business.

A Little History

I'll start off with a bit of my own history as a software developer. I've been pursuing the idea of living from my own projects since 2006. At that time, my brother and I quit our jobs to make mobile games in the pre-smartphone era. We worked together for some time, and then iOS came on the scene.

When iOS was out, we released a hit – a game that received 3M downloads. It was amazing that one of our games finally became a hit. In fact, in some countries, it was insanely popular. Even after all these years, people still share in the comments, in the AppStore and PlayStore, where they share memories of how they played the game when they were kids.
Although we did monetize the game a little bit, it still didn't earn enough to make a living.

It Was Still a Hobby

And that was a problem. The countless number of attempts to launch a product was still a hobby for me. I quit my well-paid jobs as a software developer several times to take breaks and work on the next big idea. However, after a couple of months, I had another flop and had to go back to the job market once again.

Over the years, it felt that sooner or later, I would have a product that would finally take off. However, I began to feel the reality, which was pretty simple – having only a passion for technology and graphics wasn’t enough to complete the product.

Next Steps in the Journey

So, I decided to take steps to fix this imbalance, and found I lacked crucial knowledge, which was the other side of the equation. As a result, I started learning more about marketing, product development and advertising.
I also read The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries. This book turned my world upside down, and I thought the book had given me the secret. That wasn't the case, however.

Fast-forward to 2019, 13 years later, dozens of products launched, many lessons learnt. But the reality was even more disappointing. Sometimes I spent 4 years on a project, compromising my personal life, and came to the conclusion that my projects just didn’t fly. That is very discouraging.

Then, in 2019, I had another revelation. The most disappointing issue was that I had all the keys to success with me all the time, but I couldn't apply the knowledge I’d gained. When I mentioned The Lean Startup, I couldn't imagine that it could be applied to the entire business, and not just the product. Also, an MVP may not necessarily be a product at all.

Organizing Business Goals with Mind Maps

While working with my remote team, I came up with an idea of how to organize business goals in a way that would be much simpler to understand, compared to other standard approaches. The idea is that the goals should be linked in a hierarchy - just like in a mind map. That's so logical and natural for all of us. It just made sense. In fact, my team loved it, and we had terrific results. But we did the whole thing just in a Google Doc – with no custom code at all.

I was so excited about it that I started talking to my friends, and not long after that, one of them asked me for help. Their company struggled with team efficiency and communication, so I made an offer and sold my services to them.

Indeed, the first thing that I did was create a document in Google Docs with the same structure as we used in our team. We wrote down the business objectives, broke them down into an actionable plan, and everyone was very clear about their part in the big picture. If they were skeptical they could deliver their product on time at all, after this exercise, they delivered it ahead of schedule. Their skepticism vanished!

It was obvious that it is a useful and valuable tool. I knew I would be creating a product out of this. Eventually, I did make it, and it is called Ubjective.com.

Formalization & Launch

It took only one month from formalizing the idea to launch. This was probably one of the fastest launches for me, but for a reason.

For one thing, I realized any product or service that people want and are prepared to pay for should bring value to them. The validation starts with understanding the problem and how you can add value. All the hypothesis-test-improvement cycles should start while adding value.

Conclusion

Any software is just a method of automating the way value is being delivered. So, what happened with me was that I had been iterating my approach for more than a year. I found exactly what worked, and what didn't work. Most importantly, I was getting paid for it!

Instead of taking time off, launching a product with unverified features, spending money on ads and analyzing the stats on how it could be improved, I started the development knowing how it should be done without guessing.

I've seen a lot of people saying, "Sell first", and it is 100% true. However, start selling not a half-baked product, but start selling value to others in any shape or form.

All my previous startups helped me to systemize the way of finding how to add value, how to refine it into a product and deliver the product in the shortest time. I wish someone had told me this 13 years ago. However, maybe with this knowledge I could help you guys to save at least a few years of your hard work.

Let me know if you have the same struggles as I used to have. Just reach out if you would like some help to find a shortcut with making your products into something that people want to use.