The mistakes I made on a journey to $90k worth of preorders

Hey Indie Hackers!

My name is Pavel Gvay. I'm building Shizune.co, the AI bot that gets investor meetings for founders.

After 9 months in stealth mode, we're finally launching Shizune today. Happy to share my learnings and mistakes with you.

Progress:

• $90,000+ worth of pre-orders growing at a 100% MoM rate.
• 10+ pilots with real founders, $1,000+ in revenue.
• 100+ customer interviews, changed the idea 3 times!

About us:

• A team of 2 people. Me and my technical co-founder. I'm fulltime and he's part-time.
• Fully bootstrapped. Not planning to raise VC money. (The shoemaker's son always goes barefoot 😅)

Learnings:

• Validate the idea first, and then build it. My initial idea was to build the "network map" tool. After 20+ interviews, I realized that no one needed that. I spent 2 months talking to customers almost full-time, and it paid off — I killed 3 ideas but discovered 2 real pains that founders have.
• Selling the product is the only real validation. No matter what people say to you, ask them to buy your product. I think I got about 60% of all insights by asking people: "Why not buy?".
• You don't need a product to start selling. I got my first paying customer on Day 30 of our journey. I had no product, no landing page, no slides. I just pitched the customer on the call and then did all the work manually.

Mistakes:

• We spent 4 months building the MVP (which we are launching today). We justified that by thinking: "We're part-time, we can't go faster!". But the truth is that we could leverage no-code tools and ready-to-use APIs to launch the product in weeks, not months.
• I wasn't focusing enough. It's obvious to me today that I should've focused only on two things: a) validating the idea b) launching the product ASAP. But I was doing a whole bunch of different things: selling services that I already validated, overthinking design, applying to accelerators, and many other things. Thankfully, I stumbled upon Adora Cheung's video on KPIs and goals, and now I know how to prioritize tasks.
• I wasn't delegating enough. I spent 2 months finding investors and scheduling meetings for our customers. That's a lot of manual and repetitive work like investor research or outreach. It took all my time. I wasn't able to do anything else. I hired an assistant, and things started to move faster than ever.

I think these mistakes cost me 4-6 months of work.

My takeaways:

• Launch every 2 weeks no matter what. This rule is in our culture now.
• Set your primary metric, check your progress weekly. Ask yourself three questions: What improved the metric the most? What’s the biggest obstacle to growth? How can you move faster?

Happy to answer questions if you have some. Especially about fundraising, I learned quite a lot about it. Thank you for the attention and support! 💚

You can also reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter.

P.S: If you're fundraising, check out Shizune: https://shizune.co

It will help you close your round earlier by saving weeks (months?) on investor research and outreach.