What did your first project look like? Here's why I think mine failed and what I learned from it
Hi, I'm Connor 👋
I'm a software engineer who cares deeply about design. I work as a software engineer for a tech company, and it's my goal to one day work for myself full-time.
My first project idea
In 2020, a lot of people (myself included) were looking for new therapists. The search for a therapist happens online for many people, so having a nice website to represent a therapy practice is important (even more so during the pandemic when you couldn't meet in person).
So, in September 2020, I started my first project, which was a productized service providing well-designed websites to therapists. The idea was for therapists to choose one of three website templates, I would add their information to it, and maintain it for them in perpetuity for a monthly price.
As engineers, we're tempted to funnel effort into the implementation of something
When I launched the project, I poured so much of my time into designing and building the actual websites I was selling, as well as the marketing website for the product. Since good design was what I was trying to provide, I felt that I needed to make every extension of the project pixel perfect and professional.
I had this idea that I would launch and people would come
As you'd expect, I was wrong. I didn't have an audience, nor did this niche community have trust in the company I started, which I later learned is especially important when selling to niche communities.
I tried out a few strategies for increasing traffic and getting sales
Cold email through Psychology Today
I reached out to any therapist on Psychology Today who had a website that could use some help. This was time-intensive, got me a very small amount of traffic, and no sales.
Pinterest Pins
I tried leaning on my design skills to post a massive amount of nice-looking Pinterest pins showing off the websites and describing the service. This got me a little bit of traffic, but nothing substantial, and no sales.
Word of mouth/personal network
I talked with different friends of mine who worked as therapists or knew therapists to see if they were interested in the project. People expressed interest and validated that it was something they needed, but never ended up purchasing the product.
With no sales coming in, fear crept in that I was putting effort in the wrong place
After trying all of those strategies for ~2 months with little success at increasing traffic and no sales, I began to feel like there was something else wrong with my project — the core beliefs I assumed about the community of therapists.
I didn't do any customer research before making the project. My hypothesis about what people care about when looking for a therapist was based on what I cared about when I looked for one. I was relying solely on my own experience and not on customer research to inform a core assumption of my project.
So I stopped working on the project and decided that I needed to learn more about customer research before moving forward, which led me to take a course that I'm sure many of you have heard about called 30x500 (if anyone's interested, I can post more about that experience).
Here are 3 valuable lessons this project taught me
- Working as an engineer gets you in the habit of believing execution alone will yield results. As an engineer, your work takes place at the very end of so much other work that makes a product successful. We're used to building things, sending them out into the world, and seeing success pretty quickly.
- It's vastly meaningful to build an audience and be active in it before creating a product for it. Let the audience tell you what they need and are willing to pay for, and build a product around that.
- If you have a goal that you're trying to accomplish, it's easy to get swept up by an idea. You have all of this energy that you want to put into a project, so you might be tempted to direct it towards the first idea you can think of. Put research and time into validating that the problem you're trying to solve is actually worth solving. Your time and your motivation are valuable resources that you have to protect against this temptation.
This sounds so much like my experience building my first project. It's in the exact same niche of mental health. My app is called Mind Sanctuary. It's a bit different as mine features a mood, symptoms, and medication tracker along with psychometric surveys and stress reduction exercises. I'm in exactly the same position. Not getting many active users and I feel like it's hard to connect to the audience. I'd love to hear what you think of my application and what you recommend I do. I'm interested in knowing more about the 30x500.
That's a tough spot to be in! I empathize with the challenges you're facing. This process is really hard, so the fact that you've gotten users at all is still a win.
My best advice is to find a way to authentically participate in the community you're trying to serve. That could be by contributing to mental health forums, Slack channels, Facebook groups, etc..
One thing I learned from 30x500 is to provide these "small wins" for your audience. What that means is a small piece of value you can provide to a potential customer for free to help them build trust in you and your app.
This could mean doing something like actively providing help in a forum (without pushing your product) or maybe giving out a useful infographic on one of the exercises.
I did this when I was writing an e-book and trying to build an audience and I found that it worked in terms of establishing credibility and sending a lot of traffic to my site. I would write blog posts answering some of the most common questions I'd see asked in a forum and provide free downloadable resources if they joined my email list.
I hope this helps!