Just Showing Up Daily isn't Enough. You need more! I saw founders...
John Rush@johnrush
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Jan 04, 2024
~4 min read
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Just Showing Up Daily isn't Enough.
You need more!
I saw founders showing up daily for 10+ years. But most still failed. I tried extracting the common practice from those who succeeded. Learning this helped me to get my own wins.
[1] If you don't like it, nobody will.
It may sound strange, but most founders never used their own product for real.
One day a girl who's making a tool that helps with social media posts asked me: how to grow my tool?
I looked at her social media and saw no posts except promo posts.
I asked her: Your tool helps with social media, but why don't you use it yourself?
I must admit, I'm guilty of this myself.
I've made this mistake multiple times: building for an imaginary user. And every single time I failed. So I learned the hard way.
Many years ago I was building a tool to manage my startup captables. I was pushing it forward, raising from VCs, but my own captable was managed in Excel, not in the tool I've built for it.
Well, you can guess how it ended up.
→ Action point: you must use your own tool. Your #1 goal is to make yourself happy. Forget about the users. Make yourself happy first. But don't make the mistake here, dont get happy by seeing a beautiful landing page or design. Or several features. You must be a real user. Solve a real problem you have using your tool.
___
[2] Less is More
When you climb the mountain, you don't take everything with you. On one hand, the more you have in your bag, the better prepared you are. But the weight of the bag may end up being your main obstacle that will fail you.
When launching products, we feel very insecure.
- "What if users don't like it?"
- "What if they need more features?"
- "The more features I have, the better it looks..."
Sorry, but No!
You don't go to the restaurant because they have 1000 average meals on the menu.
You go when they have a few that you care about done really well and taste delicious.
You never hear a friend saying "Go check that place, they got 1000 average meals there..".
But you hear someone say "Go to that place, they got the best stake in the town".
→ Action point: at the early stage, only focus on a few things. Ideally on 1 single feature. You can have the rest in the roadmap. If the user tries your tool, and it's missing lots of features, but the one cool feature that you offer is just amazing, then trust me, the user will sign up for it and wait for the other features to come later. Also, this user will share it with friends. This is what I do in my every product. You should do this too.
____
[3] Don't make it scalable
Making scalable software vs making nonscalable is a very different process and the time it takes may differ a lot. Most of my tools start as "human+frontend". I don't even build the backend. Things like this take just hours to launch. But making a proper solution takes weeks/months. The fun part is that the end user often gets a better service from my first implementation, where it's just a frontend + human as a backend. Because humans are more adaptive than code.
I only code stuff once I know well how it should be done.
The best part of this approach: once I launch products, it doesn't appeal to the users at once. I end up iteration on the message, on the key features, on the way features are implemented or even pivoting the whole thing. When I have less code and more of a human in it, then iterations take minutes or can be done on the fly.
The faster I can iterate, the faster I can alter my product so that it's loved by the user.
→ Action point: Cut all the corners. Make it as fast and easy to change as possible. Often it means less code. Also, go for nocode over code. Even if you know how to code. Because often nocode tools let you change stuff faster than coding.
__
[To be continued]
I have 7 more steps to cover, and I'll cover them in my next posts.
[100xfounder.beehiiv.com]
You need more!
I saw founders showing up daily for 10+ years. But most still failed. I tried extracting the common practice from those who succeeded. Learning this helped me to get my own wins.
[1] If you don't like it, nobody will.
It may sound strange, but most founders never used their own product for real.
One day a girl who's making a tool that helps with social media posts asked me: how to grow my tool?
I looked at her social media and saw no posts except promo posts.
I asked her: Your tool helps with social media, but why don't you use it yourself?
I must admit, I'm guilty of this myself.
I've made this mistake multiple times: building for an imaginary user. And every single time I failed. So I learned the hard way.
Many years ago I was building a tool to manage my startup captables. I was pushing it forward, raising from VCs, but my own captable was managed in Excel, not in the tool I've built for it.
Well, you can guess how it ended up.
→ Action point: you must use your own tool. Your #1 goal is to make yourself happy. Forget about the users. Make yourself happy first. But don't make the mistake here, dont get happy by seeing a beautiful landing page or design. Or several features. You must be a real user. Solve a real problem you have using your tool.
___
[2] Less is More
When you climb the mountain, you don't take everything with you. On one hand, the more you have in your bag, the better prepared you are. But the weight of the bag may end up being your main obstacle that will fail you.
When launching products, we feel very insecure.
- "What if users don't like it?"
- "What if they need more features?"
- "The more features I have, the better it looks..."
Sorry, but No!
You don't go to the restaurant because they have 1000 average meals on the menu.
You go when they have a few that you care about done really well and taste delicious.
You never hear a friend saying "Go check that place, they got 1000 average meals there..".
But you hear someone say "Go to that place, they got the best stake in the town".
→ Action point: at the early stage, only focus on a few things. Ideally on 1 single feature. You can have the rest in the roadmap. If the user tries your tool, and it's missing lots of features, but the one cool feature that you offer is just amazing, then trust me, the user will sign up for it and wait for the other features to come later. Also, this user will share it with friends. This is what I do in my every product. You should do this too.
____
[3] Don't make it scalable
Making scalable software vs making nonscalable is a very different process and the time it takes may differ a lot. Most of my tools start as "human+frontend". I don't even build the backend. Things like this take just hours to launch. But making a proper solution takes weeks/months. The fun part is that the end user often gets a better service from my first implementation, where it's just a frontend + human as a backend. Because humans are more adaptive than code.
I only code stuff once I know well how it should be done.
The best part of this approach: once I launch products, it doesn't appeal to the users at once. I end up iteration on the message, on the key features, on the way features are implemented or even pivoting the whole thing. When I have less code and more of a human in it, then iterations take minutes or can be done on the fly.
The faster I can iterate, the faster I can alter my product so that it's loved by the user.
→ Action point: Cut all the corners. Make it as fast and easy to change as possible. Often it means less code. Also, go for nocode over code. Even if you know how to code. Because often nocode tools let you change stuff faster than coding.
__
[To be continued]
I have 7 more steps to cover, and I'll cover them in my next posts.
[100xfounder.beehiiv.com]
