Cutimize

The day has finally arrived.
We invited people from the waiting list to the application.
Two weeks later we also opened registration to the public.

We're now gathering feedback from the first users and do little tweaks here and there. Our focus is now mostly on preparing a good advertising strategy.

The product remains free for the time being.

From our founding duo, I am the coding founder. After a couple of months of working additional 4-6h daily (on top of the 8h contract work) I started to feel exhausted. I felt the motivation and the initial energy fading away. The amount of work yet to be done was not shrinking proportionally to the time spent because of a poor discovery phase.

We underestimated the work and complexity hidden behind nicely-sounding features, and we overestimated our capacity as far as time is concerned.

We sat down and redefined our MVP. Instead of a full-fledged complex application we decided to focus on a single module of it – automated, configurable quoting algorithm. In this narrowed MVP the manufacturer has to upload the client's files manually, get the quote and send it to the client.

That being said, we didn't abandon the initial concept. The goal of the redefined MVP was to go live ASAP with one specific piece of working viable product and continue the development with the feedback of early adopters. Or fail fast, in the worst case.

After a month into continuous development, the progress looked decent. Decent enough for us to share a launch date and a countdown (~90 days) on the landing page.

Launch date which we didn't meet because of the hidden complexity that was not yet uncovered, and because of unexpected life events. Once we realised we wouldn't make it, we postponed it by 2 months and informed the waiting list. And that 2nd date we didn't meet either, because of the same reasons as before.

That time we didn't risk with another date and just informed the waiting list that we'd let them know when the early access was available.

Despite having in mind MVPs should be small, specific and all, for some reason we've gone big from the beginning and started implementing the whole idea from the start.

What we didn't know at that point was that the MVP scope we had come up with sounded good on paper but didn't reveal its complexity by any means which fooled our estimations and caused problems later on.

Even though the idea sounded appealing, the target audience was rather a narrow one. We needed a confirmation from the market that we'd be solving an actual problem. For that purpose we created a landing page allowing interested people to join a waiting list.

We posted about our plans in two relevant Polish groups (5K people each) on Facebook. That resulted in 24 people leaving us their emails, of which 18 have confirmed (2-step sign-up process).

Given the niche size, and the fact we posted in Polish groups only, we decided it's a sufficient proof that there is an actual problem to solve.

One day the other founder came up to me and mentioned he'd been observing a common nuisance in the process of quoting in the CNC industry for quite some time then. He also mentioned he had an idea how to make the quoting easier, quicker and more accurate for both the client and the manufacturer.

The idea more or less was to create an application which would allow clients to upload files with the element to cut, and based on the manufacturer's configuration get instant quotes with the possibility to place an order and pay. Such order, along with shipping details, cutting details and the file would be processed by the manufacturer.

I liked the idea and soon had we decided to give it a try.

This was the 1st project for both of us, with no prior experience in building startups.