Embarrassing founder fact
I spent a year building a mobile app. A whole month drafting Terms of Service. Burned cash on stuff that didn’t matter.
Never shared it. Never talked to users. Built it alone. Quit before it launched.
Here’s what that taught me:
-A business is more than just an app
-Obsession is good, but a good team is better
-MVP = Minimum Viable Product, not Most Valuable Product
-Fail fast. Learn faster
Now I write Idea TBD - a newsletter where I share product ideas, early product wins (and fails), and everything I wish I knew back then.
If you're building or thinking about it, might be worth a read.
https://ideatbd.com/p/so-that-did-not-go-as-planned
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Heey Furqaan!
Thanks for sharing your journey and starting this topic.
I'm a first-time maker and I'm learning a loooot of things thanks to this experience. I started my journey with Lifetoon (the AI-native platform for episodic visual storytelling) back in February - it already feels like it's been a couple of years, considering how many experiments we've had (and fails lol).
One embarrassing thing: I thought (and hoped) that investing in ads would be a shortcut to getting results, even if we don't have PMF. Nonono - in our case, it was just a waste of money. I realised the mistake I made a couple of days in, and stopped the ads. Now, we're focused on nailing the PMF, getting in-depth feedback from our first users, building ICPs, and maybe after we can look into ads again.
Since the failed ads experiment, we had the MVP launch, which had us close the platform after just 24 hours - way more people than we expected used it. This Tuesday, we launched Lifetoon 1.1. Exciting! We're starting to get more clarity on a potential PMF, and we already have +100 on the platform.
Furqaan, I remember you mentioned you tried Lifetoon and enjoyed it! If anyone else is curious, join the comics side here: https://www.lifetoon.me/
@ruxandra_mazilu You’re not alone on the ads thing. I’ve definitely fallen into that same trap, thinking it would shortcut the hard parts. It’s super cool to see how much you’ve learned and how quickly you’ve iterated.
Also, for anyone reading this: try Lifetoon! It’s a really fun tool, and we plan to feature the comic in our newsletter's next edition.
@ruxandra_mazilu @chaosandcoffee Influencer marketing / in-house production content is def the way to go. I think people just value authentic content that doesn't sound like a commercial. What irks me is the fact that even when you run an ad on instagram for example, it adds a "sponsored" tag which drives off people.
Regardless looking forward to both the products you guys are working on! Will def give newsletter a read and Lifetoon a try
@indukeys Absolutely - I actually saw one PH product, Mindcraftor, in a reel the other day. It felt super organic and apparently brought in 500+ signups for him. Don’t think a sponsored post could’ve pulled that off the same way.
And really excited to have you reading the newsletter! 🙌
Product Hunt
What stopped you from sharing it or talking to users?
When I saw this: "A business is more than just an app" my first reaction was to think the opposite. At the beginning, all that matters is the app, and getting people to use it, and learning from them. All the typical "business" stuff - like TOS - is usually a distraction.
@rajiv_ayyangar Looking back, it was a mix of fear and overconfidence - fear of putting myself and an unfinished product out there, and overconfidence in thinking I understood the problem well enough just because I was a student myself.
We were building a college community app for students in India, but confused building an app with building a community. Toward the end, the app was doing a bunch of things that didn’t really matter and the actual problem I set out to solve got buried in the noise.