Rant
Hi all,
I'll start by saying that I have worked on a number of failed/stagnant startups over the past 10 years (approx. 6 of varing degrees from 'experiment' to fully fledged SaaS). Recently I've been feeling very ground-down by it all. Not so much because none of the project are successful, but more because I feel like I'm being used for my skills and my partners never seem to put in much work.
I'm a developer and I usually approach these things from the perspective that I do all the coding and the others involved take care of everything else (design, marketing, etc.). This never seems to work out and I'm always left, having worked hard on developing a product, with the feeling that the others have not put in enough effort to sell it. And then I quite often get the whole 'if only we could develop feature xyz we'd be successful'. Which makes me start to feel like I don't want to add features to my product (which obviously I do because I want it to be as good as possible).
My current project is no different. It started out as my partner's idea, and aside from having no real plan for monetisation, I came on board because I felt like it had potential.
We started by building an iOS app, two SPA's and an API to link it all together. This was a lot of work for me as the only dev. Once this was finished, for me it was like 'ok, over to you to show me this was worthwhile and people actually want it'. My partner then proceeded to do some marketing. In reality this amounted to a handful of emails to a potential customers, with some luke-warm replies which never really went anywhere. A few tweets and not much else. He then decides that the product needs improvements and I then spend a load more time developing more functionality. He send a few emails again to more 'shrugs' from potential customers, ad infinitum. So we're in this endless cycle, which I would be kind of fine about if the workload was not so heavy for me.
I don't know how many others on here have the same setup as me and feel similar, I might be coming across as being the difficult one, but I wanted to say out loud what I've been thinking for ages now.
Rant over!
😐
Don’t take this the wrong way, but surely you’ve been around long enough to know the approach above is doomed to fail, most of the time? It’s backward, right?
If you don’t want to keep repeating the same process and getting the same unpleasant result, then figure out how to validate before building a bunch of stuff. Get the other guy to demonstrate to you that it’s worth your time, effort and consideration.
HTH 🍻
Yeah totally, I'm starting to realise this. I guess a lot of the time I am happy to knock up a quick MVP to get the ball rolling, but it does tend to quickly get out of control when the feedback from that doesn't go well and I start to add features.
You're totally right though, I need to get the other parties to give concrete evidence of market fit first.
Yeah concrete evidence would be great or at least some signals that look realistic.
Also worth asking a lot of questions about how they might go about finding a market or where they intend to speak to customers. This could be really important for implementation of a “better mouse trap”. Let’s face it, you can already build stuff that might be better than alternatives, but that’s totally irrelevant if you can’t actually reach a set of customers. 🙂
Good luck with future endeavours 🍻