How ignorance helped me launch and grow my product, and how it can help you.

A week ago I was on a chat with @sabba from VEED.

He asked why the existing market for image editing SDKs hadn't scared me off when I started out with Pintura.

It boils down to ignorance, I was literally unaware of the competition.

Back then I was selling my products on CodeCanyon and was marketing to that audience. When looking for new products to build, I would scout the existing CodeCanyon popular products section to find products that I could do better.

I found a pretty decent image editor but felt the UX could be vastly improved. So I started building mine because I was confident I could take over. It never occurred to me to look at the market outside of my little bubble.

The MVP took a bit longer than expected. (In my opinion that's related to the opposite of ignorance. I'm an experienced developer/designer. I get stuck deciding which software design patterns to use and improving tiny user experience details, I simply can't ignore them). It's easier to build an MVP when you're ignorant of all these factors at play and you're building towards your goal (the product) instead of worrying about how you are building it.

Even though I'm an experienced developer, I was ignorant about the space I was entering. By accident, I only researched a subsection of the market and wasn’t aware of the big players so I felt confident I could make a difference. Only after releasing and revenue growing did I find out about a couple serious competitors.

By the time I found out about the competition, I had already built version 2 of the editor, revenue was growing, and I was well on my way to building a worthy competitor. Had I found out about the competition before starting I might’ve decided against pursuing it in the first place. But I didn’t and now I’ve taken my piece of the pie.

I'm not sure if there's a concrete lesson in there. I think it definitely underlines the importance of getting started instead of being stuck in the idea/research phase.

This was inspired by this thread: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/the-ignorance-advantage-570b0c9719