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VisionPage - Should I keep going?

by Deven Jarvis

Hey everyone,

I generally suffer from the “build the perfect product for a year before showing anyone and learning I made the wrong thing” mistake and I’m trying to break the habit. So after about a month of work I’ve released an MVP of my latest product: VisionPage. I’ll try to let the landing page speak for itself, but it’s essentially team roadmaps as a service. It’s completely free right now and I’m really looking for some feedback to make sure this is something worth continuing to spend my time on.

So, if you wouldn’t mind taking a look (warning it’s pretty rough on mobile still) I’d really appreciate your help answering:

  1. Is this something I should keep building? More specifically would you or people you know use and (eventually) pay for this?

  2. Assuming yes to #1, what should i do next to improve/grow this into a viable business?

Any additional feedback you have would be very welcome! My current strategy is to share VisionPage with someone new everyday for as long as I can. After a week of friends and family, it’s your turn IH!

https://visionpage.io

Deven Jarvis's avatarDeven Jarvis
on November 1, 2020
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  1. 1

    Very cool idea. Some thoughts here:

    1. Are you sure that you're describing the product in the way that your users would? I would call this a "Gantt chart builder." I consider "roadmap" to be a type of strategic document listing the planned features for product development that can be represented in multiple forms: a bulleted list, a kanban board, a gantt chart, etc. Lots of people create Gantt charts unrelated to product roadmaps. For example, consultants, marketing teams, sales teams, and project managers use them to plan phases of a project.

    2. Can you describe hyper-specifically who your users are? A good test is whether you can describe your ideal users so specifically that there are only a few thousand of them in the world. That doesn't mean that your product wouldn't be useful for others too, but the advantage of doing this is that it helps you describe the benefits of this product vs. the alternative. Here are some examples of product benefits you could highlight:

    • Easier to create charts than it is with ThinkCell.
    • Easily embed the chart into a website
    • Different people have permission to control different project deadlines in the gantt chart.
    • Easily customize the chart to the colors and font that match your company brand.

    Which of these features matters to your user base depends on who those target users are, and it will be easier to describe those target users if you define them extremely narrowly.

    ryanh1's avatar ryanh1
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    6 years ago
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    1. 1

      Thanks for this feedback, this is great!

      1. This is a good call. I'm a product owner at my current company and I build roadmaps for my team using this type of style which is why I went with the name, but I agree with your point that there are other types of roadmaps and other uses for this type of chart.
      2. Really appreciate the ideas for potential product benefits. As mentioned above this was really first started to scratch my own itch, so my first stab at a super niche audience would be: Product owners of internal-facing agile teams?

      Thanks again, really appreciate you taking the time to provide some feedback

      Deven Jarvis's avatar Deven Jarvis
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      6 years ago
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  2. 1

    Start with the why. Why are you doing this? Why should anyone care? Why are you the one who can make it fly?

    Often ideas are great but the execution is wrong. Often the idea is not good enough even though you are killing it. And yeah, distribution is a thing. "Build it and they will come" does only work if everyone knows about it.

    xh3b4sd's avatar xh3b4sd
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    6 years ago
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