I wasted 18 months building a product no one wanted.

This is tough but sounds very familiar. When you enjoy coding it is easy to think that simply building is adding value and moving you forwards. It is if your sole aim is to build but if you want to build something people want then it's a trap and we are relying on luck.

By the way: I fall into this trap all the time

Most of the time we get into features more than what the user needs are. Minimum Lovable product is an interesting concept. Build a small part of your idea as MLP and then build on top of it based on user needs and feedback.

Had the same exact thing happen to me, very well written!

@jones_spencera were you a single founder in the product and also a technical background?

I might be falling in the same boat, launched my product 2 weeks ago and completely underestimated marketing effort and getting customers. I was too focused on the product that solves my problems. I am still going to continue for 3months though, part of why I started this journey is to move beyond coding and I have and still will learn so much from this.

What was the 18 month failed product?

Thank you for sharing Spencer, I'm pretty sure you learned from that journey and that the next one will be better. Cheers !

I'm very intrigued by the idea of people building things for Twitter. For a social network where the number of monthly active users has been roughly the same for six years now, I'd be concerned about general lack of interest. Of course, I never really embraced Twitter like I should have.

Regardless, great thread, and great takeaways. Remember to focus on the personal growth you experienced over the past 18 months.