Designvote

After talking to some users, I realized that most of them wanted to give feedback/discuss with other designers and so I shifted the focus towards more of a community than an individual SaaS product.

Check it out if you are a designer or if you want people to give you feedback on your design work! You will have access to all the public designs other people have created.

I posted a video on Reddit presenting the product. It had a GREAT response - 330 upvotes and many comments. I had 15 signups just from that, and one user used the product to choose from the multiple logos he has designed for his product. I am so proud of this.

I had many users sign up and then leave immediately. I feel reassured that he actually used it like it was intended because it means Designvote is worth pursuing. Funny thing is that just a day before, literally a day before that post, I was considering abandoning the product after a call with a more experienced entrepreneur.

I had some great feedback from that post and possibly found a new way for designers to get feedback that I can actually monetize. I will keep updating this! Thank you!

It took me about 5 months to get here.

What I learned is you should ALWAYS KEEP TALKING TO USERS and keep advertising your product while you are building it. User feedback is the most crucial part of this process.

Good things I did:

1. I worked a full-time job while building this (still am) and the best advice for consistently building if you are employed is to wake up early. Wake up at 5 am, wake up at 4:30 if you can, and keep building.
2. I set clear deadlines for the project which got me motivated to keep working. I knew I had to finish the MVP until April 1st

What I would do differently now?
I would split my time 50/50 between building the product and talking to users to understand the problem.
I would take more pre-made UI from the web (buy if you have to). I invested too much time tweaking the UI in order for it to be perfect.

I was working at a startup building a mobile app companion to help travelers visit cool places. While there, the designer was always complaining that it took him so much time to get feedback on his designs and choose between multiple versions of the same design.

The moment the lightbulb come on was when he showed me a list full of examples of search inquiries that failed to find a product.

I researched what other designers were doing to get around the problem and I saw that the solutions were not great and many just accepted this as the norm.

A mistake I did here was I immediately started building. I should have probed the market even further. Build a landing page or some mock-ups and test those out.

Building a startup is long commitment and you should always do research before embarking on this journey. My startup will work because I will make it work!