MVP's take too long
by tbarnettI've been working, on and off, on the back-end technology for PF for almost five years. I think this is normal for engineers, so I feel I'm preaching to the choir. Design is not my forte, and the first thing I plan to do once I validate my product is invest in some good design help. I would appreciate any feedback or guidance on PF's main page.
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First thoughts:
- You've kept things simple, which is a good idea if you're not good at UI/UX design
- What's the benefit of "Parsed 10-Q/Ks, in Excel, on demand?" I'm clearly not in the target market (don't even know what a 10-Q/K is), but if I were you'd need to sell me on how it'll make my life/business better. Will it save me time and/or money? What problem does it solve? Your headline and sub-headline describe the product, but it really needs to sell the benefits. Avoiding Excel plugins doesn't sound like a big deal to me (as someone who's never used Excel plugins)
Five years does sound like a long time. It reminds me of my first product. I read "Lean Startup," and thought that I was following its advice with creating an MVP. However, I still felt like I needed to "engineer things properly," so that I'd be able to develop it into something amazing. "Engineering things properly" took years longer than expected, after which I discovered that I'd built a "well-engineered" product that few wanted. I made other mistakes too, but was too burnt out toward the end to fix them and try again. So, I abandoned the project.
I could've saved a lot of time by making a truly minimal prototype riddled with technical debt that I'd have to rewrite later. It sounds horrible from an engineering perspective, but I would've learnt that I had missed the mark early, and may have had enough steam to correct course. If I had found product-market fit, then rewriting would have been hard work, but worth the effort.
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The five years was more a hobby project, and validating whether I could deliver on the scale/platform for this. Which I can! It just took awhile.
Thanks for your feedback on my front-page. I need to work on educating the user up-front. Any advice on "learn to build a SAAS sales" funnel type stuff? There's too much information out there and I'm overwhelmed.
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You're welcome. I have no advice for building SAAS sales funnels, because I've never done it myself. I'm still working on engineering my own "overnight success" (over 10 years and counting...).
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I am a newbie, so don't take my opinion too seriously.
- It shouldn't take five years to create an MVP. Maybe you should double check if you are adding too many features.
- I would use a free/cheap template for the landing page. I'm not a good frontend engineer, that's why I didn't designed my landing page from scratch. My landing windmotion.io (initial version) was done from a free simple landing page I got from github and deployed easily and cheap in aws lightsail.
