Trustvocate

After a ton of technological changes, learning how to manage product myself and building much more than a basic MVP, we have finally gotten to on-boarding customers. Yes, all this while, I was also trying to sell the product without having fully built it!

Right when we were looking to launch and fixing our last set of bugs and errors, we decided to migrate from MySQL to Mongo. It took have taken us less than a month is what we thought. And we actually finished it in a months time, which was awesome! But was it the right decision to delay the already super-late launch? Well, only time will tell!

We did take a tad bit too long to re-write and get our version 1 ready. I wouldn't call it an MVP since the product and its features were far from it. The competition is negligible in India, however, seeing some advance solutions out there in the market often got me distracted, pushing the launch dates further.

However, this time, I was EXTREMELY lucky. While starting to code the web-app from scratch and I learnt a million things about tech, on the go. We decided to build with Node.js on the backend and React.js on the FE. Good Node and React devs are an extremely difficult find when on a tight budget, so I hired part-timers while learning to be a product manager on the side.

Yes, I'm one of those! I don't know how to code, yet decided to build a tech startup. I was kind of desperate for help. I needed to find someone who could build this out with me. I did find the person, however, I was unlucky. He wasn't the best but I didn't have any other choice! We started and built the first version out. Three months in, I knew this wasn't going to work out however I didn't want to give up on the idea! I knew there would be a way out. I put it all on hold until I moved back to India and found a team to work with me on this.

Getting on to MSc. Entrepreneurship at UCL, we were to explore any particular idea to learn the process of idea validation. Initially, I thought of recurring payments service in India. However, the barrier to entry seemed extremely high! So, I thought I'd dwell deeper into building a customer reviews platform for emerging brands in India that I once thought of. That's exactly what I took to!