MetaDock: The journey so far

My startup is MetaDock (https://www.metadock.org), a productivity tool mostly used by crypto traders currently.

I am a one-man startup. I'd like to talk about some things I did right and some things I did wrong.

What I did wrong: Didn't market as soon as I could have

I waited for my app to get good before I properly learned how to market. This is not the way.

Marketing takes valuable time and effort and at the end of the day, the most crucial thing being time.

You can't expect your product to become popular overnight with just a bit of marketing down the line. Mind you, I'm sure a startup with a huge ad budget and professional marketers will do just fine, but I don't think that's the majority of startups.

What I did right: Go hard on community

Thanks to an influencer's community, my app has sales. Not a lot of sales, but sales nonetheless.

These users don't just use my app and pay for it, they are messengers for my product. They tell people they know about it, and they effectively are salesmen for it as well.

This wouldn't be possible without an influencer that actively promotes my product on his twitch stream, and definitely some luck in finding such a great influencer.

Influencer marketing was very effective in my case.

What I did wrong: Overengineering my product relative to my niche

I personally have a habit of making something better and better until it's where I want it to be. That was incorrect in this case, because I wasn't specifically engineering it at the users in my niche.

My product now has some features that some users will never use. Not only do I have to support these features, because some people do and some people don't, but I don't believe it's safe to remove them either - even on the off chance that a subscriber is using it.

All this said, I hope this is helpful to someone.