Our first 2 weeks of the 12-in-12 Challenge

Last week I wrote a post about why @glazy and I are doing the 12-in-12 challenge. Please go and read that post to see our motivations for the challenge. This week I wanted to give an update on our progress so far and share some early learnings.

Our first project Feedstat, is a feedback gathering tool that we've been discussing between ourselves for quite some time. We decided to start with Feedstat as it will give us a great way to gather feedback for all of our future projects. Earlier today we started onboarding users who signed up for Early Access. Right now, we are gathering feedback for feedstat, through feedstat.

We'll be working with Early Access users and expect to launch soon. If you want to be part of Early Access, we'll be accepting invites until 5pm GMT on Sunday (22nd January).

So, what have we learned so far...

Validating the idea saves time and helps with motivation. This shouldn't come as a surprise, but you don't want to invest a lot of time building a product, only to find out that no one really cares about your product. We spent roughly 3 days designing the dashboard and building the marketing site. Our Early Access program is showing that a lot of people are interested in the tool and it is an ongoing source of motivation

Marketing is hard, but very important. Just posting on your socials that you've "launched" doesn't mean you're done with marketing. You need to keep reaching out to your potential customers and make them aware of your product.

Listening to your users ensures you're building the right features. Our previous project, InABunch, started getting more users, and we are now receiving feature requests. This is cool, because we no longer have to guess which features will deliver the most value for our users, we can use their feedback to guide us in the right direction. We also plan to get feedstat on InABunch in the next couple days, so our users can have a better experience while giving feedback.

We still believe the 12-in-12 helps us to remain focused and more deliberate with our time. I'll continue to do updates on the challenge here and @ferdipret