Lessons Learned Building A Golden Kitty Award-Winning Product
Hey Indiehackers!
When I was browsing Twitter the other day, I came across this tweet by Suhail:
The diagram really resonated with my experience building One Word Domains in the last 9 months. More specifically, the Trough of Sorrow hit me the hardest, as I've had my fair share of lows building this project as a solo founder.
Therefore, I thought it would be interesting to share my journey with One Word Domains so far and explore the similarities between my story and Paul's startup curve – especially given Product Hunt's Golden Kitty Awards last week.
SPOILER ALERT: One Word Domains won the Side Project category.
Feel free to read the full article here: https://www.oneword.domains/blog/golden-kitty
If you're short on time, here's a quick TL;DR of my 4 biggest takeaways from the whole experience:
1. Just Keep Shipping
There will times when you'll feel like the initial momentum of your product is dying down. Don't fret – just keep your head down and keep building.
There will be times when you'll feel like you are shouting into the void – be it when you're sending out an email blast to your mailing list or when you're tweeting about your latest feature updates. Don't sweat it – keep posting and interacting with your users.
Your efforts compound over time, and trust me, people do see the effort that you're putting in, as long as you keep at it. Consistency is key.
2. Obsess Over Your Users, Not Your Competition
Instead of worrying about your competition, try building a rapport with your users. You can do this by reaching out to them with a personalized message, or by replying to their comments on Twitter. Startups that do well don't excel because they beat the competition – they do well because they provide the best user experiece for their users.
Treat your customers like they're your bosses – because technically speaking, they are. Nailing down the user experience will, quite literally, make or break your product
3. Be Smart With What You Build
Sometimes, it's better to use an existing product than build from scratch. It took me two whole months to get One Word Domains' affiliate program up and running because I decided to built my own affiliate management tool – Recurrence.
If I had gone with an existing solution, I could've saved 2 months of precious dev time and used it to build more features for One Word Domains.
I learned this the hard way. Don't be like me. If you're having a hard time making a decision, try out Baremetrics' Build VS Buy calculator to get some perspective.
4. Rocket Ship Growth Is Overrated
A few months into the project, I already knew that One Word Domains was not going to be the next unicorn. At first that made me feel a little insecure, but I eventually came to terms with it. I realized that you don't have to build the next Facebook or Uber to be happy/live a comfortable life. All you need is:
- A profitable business that generates a healthy amount of passive income every month
- A loving family
- Friends that you can hang out with every now and then.
Everything else is just icing on the cake.
Instead of glorifying rocket ships and hockey stick growths, we should also normalize – or at least acknowledge that commercial airlines and linear, healthy growth trajectories are cool too.
Hope this helps – feel free to let me know what you think in the comments! Also, I'd love to connect on Twitter – just shoot me a DM and let's chat!
