It took forever to build a good product

To build a good product, we need to understand what users expect.

It is hard to understand what users expect, some product never gets there if you don't have a chance to hear any voice at all. Building in public is a great way to do so, no need to hide how bad the product could be, believe it or not, it can be completely off, but give it some time, bring it to people, capturing what people care most, and you shall have the right direction to navigate to.

We tried a bunch of things: brand Columns a real-time analytics product, and a focus on anomaly detection, blog post publishing, no-code apps build, and metrics prediction. Every single of them is a good idea, but none of them is a good starting point.

A good starting point is something pretty basic and simple that initial customers can come to you.

At this moment, we figured out an area where "storytelling" is the main theme. A simple and easy-to-use visualization tool that many technical or non-technical people will all love to use to transform their data into a beautiful story, ready for communication. No matter what stage we are at, building a great experience is always the highest priority, make the basics right, and make users happy.