My dumba** idea

I decided to build a product. Well, I've built a lot of products, but this time I was determined to actually put myself out there. Build an MVP, find communities, validate your idea, etc... Even it meant people telling me it sucks.

In my free time, I do a lot of hunting and fishing. I've always felt there is a huge opening for online products in this space. No one touches it. Likely due to it not being a common hobby for online creators and developers. I do quite a bit of hunting on public land, sometimes traveling across states. It's a pain in the rear to research everything you need for these trips though.

The product

So I built thehuntlist. Nomadlist was a great comp to what I wanted in this product, so I shamelessly used it as inspiration when designing the site. The MVP was built with Laravel, Tailwindcss, and Mysql. It's was pretty barebones, just a homepage where you can filter public locations and then drill down to see data about the location. Nothing to fancy. It would solve the main issue I was trying to tackle. It took me about 4 days total to build.

Data and Marketing

Adding locations was very tedious. Initially I thought about building a scraper to pull the data from various sites and filling in the gaps manually. I then remembered Nomadlist original data set was crowdsourced by it's users. So I decided to do the same. I made an airtable form anyone could fill out. I then made 1 post on /r/fishing and /r/hunting subreddits, explaining the idea, asking for feedback, and hoping some people would be interested enough to add some data.

Holy Sh** it Worked

Just kidding. My initial posts did not go well. I did get some nice data in my airtable form like this😂😂

All of the feedback was negative. The majority of feedback was why would someone want to share their hunting/fishing spots. I re-iterated this wasn’t an app to show what little part of a lake you could go to catch a big fish. It was to help plan fishing/hunting trips and know what is needed legally, nearby food, hospitals, the weather, etc... Everyone responded with we can just do that ourselves online. (You can, after spending hours of time doing it) This is feedback I hear other founders say they received at the beginning of their projects as well. There is a group of people (imo a loud minority) who are set on doing things themselves rather than paying to make it less painful. Taylor Otwell calls this having a high pain tolerance.

What to do now?

I still believe there are people out there who could find this app useful, so I will probably build that scraper I talked about and compile the data set myself. I will also find more communities to share my app with. If anything, everyone telling me how terrible it is has made me more determined to do it.

Lastly, to anyone else who is building things silently, PUT YOURSELF OUT THERE. I am glad I chose to share this project publicly. I've always built things in silence. Trying to avoid people making me feel stupid or insecure. Despite the terrible feedback, doing this has given me a lot of confidence. I'm actually looking forward to sharing more of my projects publicly and getting feedback.