Sorry But Your App Idea Sucks
This is a complete guess but I am going to say that at least 50% of the people reading this article now are sitting at their desk at work making it seem like they are working until the day ends. I am also willing to bet that at some point in time you have dreamt about working for yourself or starting your own company around a great app idea you have. Both of those statements were true for me before I quit my job on the final day of 2016. I felt like it was a symbolic point in time to quit, new year new me.
Instead of just moving jobs like so many times before, my goal now was to finally pursue my ultimate dream of starting my own company. I wanted to feel the satisfaction of building something from nothing. Since I had gained more experience programming as a software engineer, I felt this was the perfect time to start. I was finally excited about working again since I was now building a product that I wanted, not what someone else was paying me to do. So I did just that, I had a huge notebook full of ideas of apps & websites I wanted to build so I just picked my favorite one and started building. I spent hours of everyday and weeks of every month building this product. While I was putting in twice the amount of hours I was before and not getting paid for it this time, I still enjoyed every second since I was finally following my dreams.
Fast forward to 2 months later working on this project non-stop and I finally had it to a point that I was satisfied with all of the features I built out. I was proud of what I had made and was confident others would be too. As you might have guessed…I was wrong. I released the app out to the public, told everyone I knew and after a few weeks I had a total number of….wait for it….1 user! Me.
All the excitement that I had at the start was completely gone. I had no idea why no one else thought the app was good enough to use. Was I the only one having this problem? Was there a feature that didn’t work correctly? Could people even find it in the app store? I had so many questions and no real way to answer them, why? Because I missed the most obvious part of building a company/product, the customer. If no one sees what you built then it doesn’t matter how amazing it is.
What had I done wrong? Build it and they will come, right? Field of Dreams couldn’t have been wrong, could it? Well believe it or not a quote from a film about ghosts from baseballs past should not be applied to building a startup. After the anger of another failed app had passed I decided to research what other startups had done to grow it’s user base from tech giants like Airbnb, Uber, Venmo etc.
What I had learned was that all of these companies that have succeeded over the years focused first not on a solution to build but instead an issue people were having in their everyday lives. It seems obvious when I say it out loud but I made the mistake of never validating my idea with real people before building my app. I learned that you should start with not just any idea but one that’s very small and niche. It’s easier to validate an idea with a specific user group instead of having the entire world as your audience. Airbnb for example started by reaching out to people in San Francisco through craigslist rental ads. Next get feedback from REAL people and build out the simplest possible product you can to validate the feedback you get. Rinse & Repeat these steps until you become a trillion dollar startup company. Simple right? Well obviously not exactly but the point I am trying to get across is that you should not make the same mistake I did by jumping right into an amazing product or app idea you have and start immediately building it out. Instead, test out your idea in niche areas with real people and iterate from there.
This article is the start of a 12 week Startup Bootcamp series I will be writing over the next few weeks. The goal is to follow this new strategy as I attempt to build out a new product for real users this time. A lot of the other articles I read are stories of people writing about their company after they had already succeeded but I want to take a new approach by documenting my process along the way. I might succeed and I might fail but you never know unless you try.
I hope you enjoyed my middle school style writing and would love to hear your thoughts on the subject! Also if your interested in seeing my failed app you can find it at https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/guideable/id1244786127?mt=8 OR https://travel.guideable.co/
