Hello from ex-founder who built startup and launched 3 products from scratch. Please meet my favorite personal mistakes with the biggest learnings. All coming from my startup Flawless App which we eventually successfully sold:
🥇"Always run user research."
Back in 2015, I and Ahmed Sulaiman released our first product.
It Failed Dramatically. We spent one year of development without proper user research, without defining the customer journey, or even having personas.
Obviously, we built something we imagined users would need but ... users had their own opinion. That taught me the importance of knowing users and their needs.
🥈 "Start small"
Really? Who doesn't know that? Everyone read about the lean startup framework except for us... We built FOUR products as our first MVP: a plugin for Sketch, a plugin for Xcode, a plugin for an iOS simulator, and a web version.
The release cycle of one year made our feedback loop ONE year long! If you'd see me now, you'll notice me blushing from shame. Start small...
🥉 "Do you know what your competitors are doing?"
In 2018, we didn't know until...
a competitor copied one of our main features. Well, doing a competitive analysis could mitigate the risk of this happened unexpectedly. This situation taught me the importance of competitive intelligence, competitive differentiation, and the power of product stickiness.
I hope, you will learn from my mistakes and will avoid them in your products.