For most of 2015 and 2016, I spent every night and weekend building an audio sharing community, uTalk (later changed to Wavve). It's hard to think about how much time we invested, and in the end, we decided to liquidate everything we built for pennies on the dollar.
While those years were a failure from a business point of view, they were not a waste. By the time we found a new market opportunity, we were determined not to make the same mistakes.
This time @baird and I adopted a "money ball" approach to product development and focused on building a profitable business rather than optimizing around a venture raise. If you're not familiar with Money Ball, you can get the cliff notes from the Brad Pitt movie by the same name a few years back.
The shift to 'Money Ball' meant we would need to change our focus to optimize our time for business returns rather than what would look cool or what VCs might want to see. We evaluated every potential product feature in terms of ROI and were ruthlessly stingy with what we built (only adding features when customers were practically begging to pay us for it).
Reid Hoffman's quote could've been our mantra during those days.
"If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late."
The first version of Wavve was a static web page with a dropdown for customers to choose their video design. When a customer paid us, they'd send us their design assets and we'd upload them to the website. Then we'd email them a link to the site's public IP address (that's right, we didn't even have a domain name), so they could choose their design from the dropdown and generate a video.
This early 'Money Ball' approach was critical to validating the market, and it reduced the risk that we waste time building something no one would pay for. As we've continued to grow the last few years, we've enjoyed higher revenue and now have the cash flow and flexibility to take more calculated risks without obsessing over ROI as much (although we still consider it).
If you'd like to read more about the Money Ball approach, I've written a detailed post on the topic here: https://nickfogle.com/startup-money-ball