PRHunter.io

Along with my newly found partner we've decided to halt working on this project for multiple reasons:

• most importantly, https://dework.xyz/ just launched in February. It's pretty much the same idea I've had all along but less specialized (which is what we should be doing as well)
• It's a marketplace type of business, so it requires a lot of work to grow (didn't consider that one before)
• While the decision to build a product that solves my business problem was correct, the solution was inadequate and too technical in nature
• Adding all the necessary features to become more like dework would require too much development effort at this stage. There are more learnings here:

With every new failed project (this is probably the 3rd, 2nd one attempted seriously) I learn a lot about the importance of having the right process and picking the right tools for the job. This is a topic for a longer post, but once again I feel like having a strongly backend technical background just bit me in the ass, as I should've focused on using tools that were less costly to run/maintain at a small scale. There is an improvement in that regard with each new project that I start, but this one's really hard to get right.

Another reason for ditching this project is that we've come up with another venture idea which we're starting together from scratch, once again applying all the learnings. I also feel more confident having a partner in the venture as that means being held accountable to someone else rather than just yourself.

Stay tuned for details on the new stuff!

We've had a couple of meetings with various people and learned the following stuff:

• The idea of the platform seems sound, however for business entities to get onboard with the platform we'd need some way of easing the legal burdens of working with crypto. This would be feasible but we'd need to take fiat money from the and use crypto in their name
• We should introduce staking to incentivize locking up cash in a bounty
• We need to add project management features as that's where the focus should be
• The technical solution of managing the payouts via backend is an unnecessary complication and should be removed. Now I see that clearly, sadly I've spent a lot of time to get that working (well, it still ain't working too well)

We need to evaluate our next steps

I've found a business co-founder with a matching skillset - we've taken off to setting up some meetings with potential customers and collecting feedback on the platform.

The plan is to focus on delivering whatever has the biggest chance of achieving business success, not necessarily focusing on PRHunter

This turned out to be a bit longer journey that I expected, but I still managed to launch a fairly complex product in ~6 months.

Definitely very happy to make this thing live and put it out there.

The biggest learning is... pick a less ambitious idea for the next project. No more 6-month long MVP's

I finally decided to give up on my previous product as it was too ambitious and launch-readiness was nowhere to be seen.

Two days later I pivoted into working on PRHunter. I now see that I repeated plenty of mistakes from the previous product, but thankfully I managed to not repeat at least some of them.

As I worked on a previous product, I was looking for some help with web development - I really hate doing UX work. I didn't want to go the usual route of finding an employee and just wanted to focus on the outcome - ideally, I could just describe the task I wanted to get done and pay them for the results.

That's how the idea for PRHunter.io was born.