Learnings from a failed product

Though “failures teach you more than success” has become a cliche, it is true. At least I think it’s true. I haven’t had “success” to suggest otherwise.

I started working on smurly, a tool to generate cool dynamic short urls in 2019. Launched it in 2020 after a lot of procrastination. It failed, terribly. Here are some of the things that I have learned from that failure.

Products start from problems, not ideas

Your side project can start from an idea, but a product starts from a problem. People don’t pay because your idea is cool, they pay because your product solves a problem.

This was my first mistake. I started building because I had an idea. When I started thinking about who the product was for or, most importantly, what problem it solved, I quickly understood that this wasn’t going to work.

Look at the most successful bootstrapped startups like NomadList, HypeFury, HighRise or FeedbackPanda, and they were built as a solution for a problem - and not because it was a great idea.

Build scrappy, perfect it over time

This isn’t good advice to share as a developer, but great advice as an indiehacker. I work as a software consultant and writing efficient code is a requirement for my job. When I first started building smurly, I wanted my code to be neatly organized, follow the best coding practices, be nicely indented and have a ton of tests. I spent a lot of time on these things. Instead, I could have shipped it, checked if it was worth the effort and then worked on perfecting the codebase.

I’m in no way trying to undermine the importance of clean and efficient code. I’m just saying that it shouldn’t be something you focus on at the start.

It’s okay for your first release to be unoptimized. What you need is a decent foundation that you can then perfect over time and eventually build upon.

Talk about what you are building

Build things in public. Let people know what you are building. Tweet about it, blog about it, make videos about it, or, if you want to take it to the next level, live stream your development on Twitch.

I was wary of sharing information about smurly because I thought that someone might steal my idea and launch it before me. Now when I look back, it was easily one of the dumbest things that I have done in my life. It’s not the problem, it’s the execution that matters.

Think about marketing from the first day

Nobody wants to put time, effort and money into a product that no one uses. It’s important to consider the key questions. Who is this product for? Where do my potential users /customers hangout online? How can I showcase the value this product generates for users?

As a developer I ignored this part of product development. I was naive to think that people would come to my web app because it was cool. Later I realized that it was only me who thought it was cool. I learnt my lesson the hard way.

Thank you for reading. Happy building!

If you liked what I wrote, you might also like what I tweet. This is my twitter.