What I learnt from my first idea which never launched
Hey everyone! This is the story of my first real attempt at launching a startup, which amounted to an idea, a product, and 0 customers. Embarrassingly enough, I spent about 6 months (when really only 1 was needed) on this project before moving on. Still though, the journey taught me lessons that I believe one can only get through experience and so I wouldn't have had it any other way.
The start of Usual
The first idea I worked on was a subscription marketplace (called Usual) that essentially aimed to help retail business owners, like coffee shops or hair salons, set up subscription services for their products. On the customer side, they would be able to browse, purchase and manage subscriptions all on the app.
So why did I work on this idea? Mainly because I personally had so many subscriptions that I found it hard to keep track of all of them, and I probably wasted a fair bit of money forgetting to cancel unused ones. However, as a marketplace idea, I only thought about the needs of the customer, and was quick to assume that businesses found it difficult implementing subscription products. Little did I know they didn't even want to!
A hard won lesson
This experience is particularly bittersweet because as someone who's technical, I spent close to 4 months building a product before ever talking to my first potential customer. Moreover, me and the person I was working with at the time came up with this whole "launch idea" which banked on one cafe at our university taking us up on this idea and joining our platform. Unsurprisingly, we failed. After that, it took about 5 interviews to realise that no retail business was even considering implementing a subscription and so we decided to call it a day. Of course, we could have reached that decision in less than a month if we only started talking to users first.
As cliche as it sounds, distributing first, building later is painfully true, and as someone technical, it was a difficult one to realise. However, it's also one that I'm glad I've finally learnt, because it feels like the sort of thing that everyone tells you, but you only start to agree with after you see it for yourself. To those out there who are technical, I know that it can be really tempting to bank on your abilities to create an amazing product, but unless you are able to evoke an emotional response from your target audience, which usually stems from solving a problem of theirs, it will be tough to get them to give you and your product a shot.
So, TLDR, talk to your customers and find out if the problem is worth solving before doing anything else. But anyways, this is the story of my 6 month attempt at launching my first idea, and I hope you found it interesting and learnt a thing or two. I'd love to hear from you guys how your first idea went. Did it launch? Did it fail? What did you learn? If you'd like to see a post about the lessons I learnt from my second idea, let me know too!
Thanks for sharing your story! I agree that many developers fall into the trap of rushing into building something. The ability to code something is one of the best things ever, but it can be a huge time sink into the wrong thing, like you said.
I decided to shelve my first Micro SaaS idea as well. I was so excited to get home from vacation and spend every day building it. But as a B2C service, I doubt it would've made much profit. Almost fell into the trap of building it anyways because some of my friends thought it was really cool (it was an AI chatbot to help you come up with social/date itineraries).
Glad you learned from the experience though. As long as your 6 months of validation turns into 1 week (or something shorter than 6 months), that's still a win. We all start somewhere!!
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, and I'm glad my experience resonated with you. It's true that the excitement of coding and creating something can sometimes blind us to potential pitfalls. In the case of my Micro SaaS idea, I also realized that the rush to build something might not lead to a sustainable business in the long run.
I can definitely relate to your situation with shelving your B2C service idea. It's tempting to dive in headfirst, especially when there's enthusiasm from friends and colleagues. However, recognizing that the idea might not translate into substantial profits is a valuable insight. Your chatbot idea sounds interesting, but acknowledging that the market might not align with your initial vision shows a thoughtful approach.
Learning from experiences, even if they involve shelving ideas, is a crucial part of growth. You're absolutely right that the goal is to streamline the validation process and shorten the timeline. Each step we take, even if it means stepping back, brings us closer to understanding what works and what doesn't.
Starting out and navigating the world of entrepreneurship is a journey filled with lessons, and every experience contributes to refining our strategies. We indeed all start somewhere, and the willingness to learn and adapt is what propels us forward. Thanks again for sharing your insights, and best of luck on your entrepreneurial journey!
I used to be in the same place. Take so much time to build something. So here I will share my take on how to solve this.
So, my rule of thumb is whatever I want to build I need to do it within weekends. Meaning straight friday night, saturday, sunday. The reason I do this is simple. I want to enjoy my weekends so my brain will automatically remove any silly thing in the product so that I can complete it faster and enjoy the weekends.
Weekdays I will plan on all the stack that I want to use and research the market. Weekend build. More than that is waste of time because you will fail, and fail and fail and then figure it out.
If you take so much time in failing you will get to figure it out place slower. Thats why you need to fail fast learnt fast and move fast. The faster you move the faster you can get through failing stage and the faster you reach your destination.
Thats why speed is the most important thing in any kind of business or anything that you want achieve in life. Check this article on how and why speed is important in building mvp. When Building MVP, Speed is the Focus
Thanks for the post!
I’m kind of in the same boat. I built a website in like 2 weeks to help researchers find papers by having a leaderboard where users can upvote papers they like.
Now I’m trying to figure out ways of finding users and marketing. I’m debating if I should continue since in its current state I don’t see how I could make money from it. And my initial talks with researchers at my university hasn’t given the best intial feedback (only talked to like 3 people).
My learnings are still in progress since I am yet to actively try marketing the idea.
So prior to making the website I didn’t know how to create a mockup that showed the idea without literally building it. Now I think using figma to create an outline of the UI to demonstrate what the product would look like is the way to go instead of spending many hours building a functional site to get validation.
The following ideas are my current plans for getting users:
Hey, that sounds like a really good plan! If you are unsure about monetisation, you should always try to get paid users on your website first to see that this is a problem that people will pay for. That's a very strong form of validation.
Of course, that is easier said then done, and so I think it's good to also continue focusing on whether and how you're solving the problem. Are researchers finding it difficult to find papers? What are the current options out there that are being used by researchers right now? Answering questions like these will help you carry your journey forward~
Thanks for the recommendations! Do you think charging users would work well for a community-based product like mine ?
Hmm, I can't really say for sure, but a freemium model could work
Hey, great post.
I am still trying to figure out the, "talking to your customers before building" approach. Do you suggest doing so without anything more than an idea? Or maybe creating a landing page with your idea and email sign up to capture interest. Or something more than that?
I wonder how much (or little) work is needed upfront to gauge the customer's interest and then what threshold is needed to confirm that building out the idea is the right way to go.
I'd also love to hear more about your second idea and any other lessons you learned.
Hey thanks for the kind words! I'm still in the process of learning how to successfully validate an idea, but my advice would be to manually reach out to a few people and ask them about the problem you're trying to solve. Once you get a feel of the sentiment then you can take bigger steps like creating a landing page and getting more feedback.
Personally, I've never had much success with landing pages mainly because I haven't been able to drive enough traffic to it but it's definitely a good indicator if you are able to. Still, I wouldn't necessarily be discouraged if you don't get much reaction from it.
As for confirming if building an idea is the right way to go, I think the main thing to lookout for is if people are facing the problem you are trying to solve and if they are greatly inconvenienced / struggling because of it. If you find people easily mentioning or raising the problem without much prompt on your side I'd say that's a pretty good sign.
Hopefully all this helps :)
Thanks for sharing that. I also have a technical background and I have similar problem to understand how to talk to users before even having something that works 😅
No problem! It's a really weird feeling for sure, and I also always feel tempted to build the product over talking to users. Nowadays, I try to build something really minimal and that doesn't take up that much time. That way you won't feel so empty handed but at the same time won't spend so much time building before talking to users!
I thought the idea of subscriptions for restaurants, especially during the pandemic, would have been a great idea and I still think the idea would work. It might be tough in a college town (it sounded like that's where you tried) given the transient nature of the workforce and the customers.
There might be ways to change the pitch that might work better. I was actually just browsing new restaurants in the area (DC) and noticed that one restaurant has a $35 yearly membership if you want to eat there. I suspect it would be really tricky to explain, but can't think why small biz owners wouldn't want subscription revenue.
What reasons did business owners give for not wanting subscriptions?
Hey actually I'm from London so that's where I tried it!
The first reason that business owners didn't go for the idea is because subscriptions are not common in the retail sector, and so to implement it came with devising a business strategy, thinking about pricing and etc which many owners didn't have the capacity to do right then.
The second reason is that implementing a subscription didn't have any clear benefits for business owners. If you think about it, the customers who are more likely to purchase a subscription are the ones that already go regularly to the restaurant / cafe, and so giving them a discount would only be losing the business money. Subscription offerings might also cannibalise their main business so there's that to think about as well.
Interesting. I tried a project a few years back working with small businesses > bodegas/corner stores. They were pretty ok with a new idea, but working with them ongoing and execution was really hard.
What was the subscription? Was the pitch kind of like a gift card? We will charge customer 1 $100 and then customer 1 will have $105 of "credit" at the store? Or was the pitch subscribing to specific products or commitments?