We shouldn't have built for an industry we have no experience in

We built a plugin for Procore, a construction management app, because we liked the platform and thought it had potential. The product, notifield.com, is based on the most requested feature on Procore's forum.

We didn't have experience (or contacts) in construction, but as a dev+design duo, we figured we could apply standard design principles to build a good product.

The problem: we reeeeeeally underestimated how hard it is to get user feedback. Turns out people don't usually reply to strangers on LinkedIn. Much of the industry isn't online, which I'd taken for granted, coming from tech. Plus there's all the obvious issues of not deeply knowing what problems really matter, and what "problems" are just nuisances that people don't mind enough to pay to get fixed.

The lesson (I think): When you don't have contacts or experience in an industry, everything is harder because there's a lot more convincing and cold emailing which slows things down, and you can't make decisions based on your own experiences. I now look at building outside your industry/experience as an "advanced" type of integration to build. It's doable, but harder and takes more time. It's not something I'd do as a side project again.

Still grinding at this, but also enjoying how much easier it is to know exactly what problems to solve with my current project, an Airtable.com plugin :)