How to do not build a product (but end up selling it anyway)

It was 2019 when I and a colleague decided to build a web product while we worked full time for a company.

I am a web developer, he is a product designer.

We discovered an idea after a customer's request for a UX/UI review of his mobile app.

We found that it was ineffective to put so many screenshots together in a doc, so we began thinking about creating a screen recording tool.

The first Proof of Concept was an Electron app in which you connect the smartphone via cable to the laptop, and the screen recording started.

We were amazed by this solution, and we believed it’d be useful for development teams and designers. Or at least that was our assumption.

The product changed over time

When web browsers started supporting the native screen recording, we switched from mobile to desktop.

But we had almost 0 users.

We tried to engage our friends, but no one used it on a daily basis. It was a signal but we were convinced that it was a good product.

So we designed and implemented a good onboarding process. We added a complex and granular permissions system. We built a browser extension for Chrome and Edge. We added integrations for the major teamwork services like Jira Cloud, Trello, and Slack.

It was a lot of work, but we still had only a few users.

Product Hunt launch

When the product was ready, we tried to attract some more users with a Product Hunt launch.

It looked like the perfect place to reveal our product to the world!

We got almost 70 upvotes, and our product ended up being the 7th or 8th product of the day. Most disappointing, we didn’t increase our user base.

While we didn’t hit our goals, the Product Hunt launch gave us visibility. The CEO of a technology consulting agency based in Italy contacted us to meet the team behind that product.

He said the product execution was solid, the landing page was clear, and the product was well designed.

We met a couple of times, and he connected us with a startup in the user testing space.

The acquisition

We began talking to the startup in March.
They said they were interested in our tool to grow their digital product, even if there were only a few recurring, non-paying users.

After a few months of evaluating different proposals, we ended up selling our platform in September. After 3 months, they were totally independent and we received the money.

Lessons learned

It was our first attempt at making a SaaS business. Of course, we made several mistakes along the way.

Here are a few of our mistakes:

• We used the product first approach.
• We built too much without validating the idea with the users.
• We started with a problem to solve, but we did not investigate the gravity of this problem and the right audience (B2C, B2B, teams, and so on).
• We didn’t have any audience and voice on the web. No presence on social networks, no newsletters, zero marketing knowledge.
• Finally, we were not prepared to sell the product, I used my personal AWS account, and it resulted in a lot of time spent on the handoff. Instead, I could have used a dedicated AWS account and transferred only the credentials (definitely quicker).

What I am doing now

It took 2 years, but I learned a lot from that journey.

I love to build products, so I want to continue with that. But this time, I’m taking a different approach:

• I started building an audience on Twitter around March 2021
• I identified a problem by looking at my struggles
• I started with a small product and validate it as soon as possible
• I added the billing asap, to validate if the problem is worth a subscription for the users

The result is hivoe.com (haɪvoiː) a solution to kickstart conversations on Twitter by leveraging the DMs.

Conclusions

I hope that my journey was interesting for you, and could help you avoid making the same mistakes.

Good luck with your journey!