Why We Do It - My First User
Dropping by to share a little inspiration(?) after just reaching a major milestone (for me) for the first time.
This community is full of people who spend their nights and weekends creating mockups and writing code and pulling their hair out while browsing Stackoverflow, and all of it with no guarantee that more than two eyes will ever see what they're working on. I don't know that the sacrifices we make are altruistic in any way - we love doing what we do and sometimes they come with real consequences - but they're sacrifices nonetheless. It can be lonely and disheartening and really tug at your sense of self while forcing you to reckon with some big questions.
For someone who doesn't get it, all of this can seem like too high of an opportunity cost. You could be going out to dinner or watching HBO or learning French, but instead you're pouring an unreasonable amount of energy into something with a completely mis-calibrated investment/return profile. Friends and family will ask you, "Are you going to quit your job to pursue this?" and you have to find some way to explain to them that it's not really about that. There is just an idea inside of you and you have the tools to put it into the world and you know you'll be agitated until you actually do.
I was going through all of this for a while, working on a Nights & Weekends project. I'd been telling friends and family about it for months, hacking away at slow and steady(?) progress, but it really felt like just another thing that was going to wind up in my digital junk drawer.
Then about a month ago, early on a Sunday morning when most of the city was still asleep, I was sitting in a coffee shop testing some user flows and tidying up my Sendgrid templates and I had a moment of overwhelm. This was it. I don't know how I defined ready in that moment, but I looked at what I had built and all of the features in front of me worked and I felt like, if I released it to the world in that moment, people would get it and be able to use it the way I envisioned they'd use it when I first started out many months ago. It felt like a real breakthrough.
Fast forward a month and I had spent countless hours admiring my beautiful new product and marveling at how I got from 0 to 1 and reflecting on the road to get there. All of this was great and fulfilling in its own way, but what I was really doing was putting off The Hard Part that I knew was coming all along - getting users. I was paralyzed at the prospect of doing something I'd never done before (I'm not a seller) and I really didn't know where to start. I started playing out all of the scenarios where they'd find bugs or tell me the design wasn't good enough or any other of a 1,000 made up problems.
Well last week I finally onboarded my first user and it was one of the greatest rushes I've had in a long time. I VC'd with a family member who owns a business in the space that I'm targeting, and I could feel my heart racing as she gave me feedback on different elements that I hadn't considered.
There has been so much content written about, "Just Launch It" and how to fail early and iterate, but even though I had internalized all of that, you don't really know how it feels until you do it. Now that I have one user, I'm obsessed with trying to get more, something I could've never imagined a year ago.
So I guess if you're like me and consider yourself an introverted "maker" who doesn't want to Sell a product, just know that there is a whole new level of fulfillment on the other side of doing so. You'll learn so much about yourself and your product by watching your users interact with it. I learned more in my 45 minute VC with user #1 than I did in many months of quietly working on it. I know that it's not perfect, and having users brings a whole new set of problems to solve for, but right now it's exhilarating to think about solving those problems.
If you care at all about interior design, architecture, floral design, or landscape design, check out my product https://useframe.xyz and shoot me a note that you signed up. I'm certainly in feedback collection mode and I'd specifically love to hear from a group of early adopters like this community. If you (or anyone you know) works or owns a design studio in these fields, I'd be happy to shoot them a free trial code in exchange for some early feedback. ✌️
