How I built the social scheduling app that I wanted, Experiment #2
Since I never launched my first product and spent way to much time on it, this time I decided to not think of an idea that absolutely no one was doing. Instead I tried finding something that already exists, but is not built in way that I would use. That way I can kind off solve my own problem, while knowing that there are other people out there that might need something similar.
Solving “my” or “a” Problem?
When I was working at my day job we would recycle some of our previous evergreen blog posts on social media. So every 2–3 weeks we would just republish the same blog posts on twitter and increase our traffic significantly (in some cases the same blog post would suddenly receive over double the traffic than before). I was doing this all manually at the time as I did not now how to code. There where some options out there like for example Edgar that where way to sophisticated for what we where trying to do and according to my boss to expensive as well. As I still help out with some social media stuff at my old company and now know how to code a little bit, I though this would be a good and relatively easy problem to solve while also knowing that people needed it (see other social media recycling tools).
So I decided that I just need a very basic app that just grabs all my old tweets that contain links, lets me filter that list and then let that app tweet them to my linked twitter account.
What I did
I have never worked with APIs before and almost did not want to build the app because of this. But all the months before I always said to myself that I wanted to try building an app with APIs as it gives you so much more possibilities. So in the end I decided to go through with it and followed a simple tutorial on how to send tweets through the Twitter API. I think it was this one: https://richonrails.com/articles/sending-a-tweet-to-twitter. In a little over an hour I had a working “app” that till this day is the core of my finished application, pretty crazy if you ask me. After making this mini app I was confident that I could learn the necessary stuff on the go and just dived in.
Oh man was I wrong…yes eventually I overcame the obstacles but it was hard, hard stuff. On some problems I would dwell for days, search stackoverflow, post to stackoverflow, check different docs, google and so on just to solve the problem by changing one small variable or changing a setting. It was horrible but at the same time pretty rewarding when I finally got something that was doing what i wanted it to do. Still, it took me way more time than any pro-efficient coder. I assume that someone who knows what he is doing could complete this app in 20–30% of the time that I did. But still, I did it.
In total I spent 76 hours on the project so far.
Why I finished it
It was definitely helpful that I was able to concentrate on this project full time for a couple of weeks that I had available. It was just my day job that I had to go to every day.
One step at a time
While working on the app I tried to break everything down into the smallest steps possible. Before tackling each step I would ask myself if this step is really necessary for the success of this app, if I decided to move along with this feature/task I would work on it until it was complete, which would sometimes last several days because I did not know what I was doing. In the end the technique of accessing the necessity of each feature and concentrating at only one task at a time helped tremendously with the completion of this app.
Get help
There where two occasion where from a developers standpoint I was just clueless, spent several days on the problem and still did not solve it. As I did not have anyone I could ask, I turned to the site codementor.io twice. A talented developer called Emmanuel helped me solve theses two problems within 3 hours. As at this point I am paying everything out of my pocket, it was a large expense for me (it was something around 120 US$ in total), but well worth the investment. I learned some nice tricks from a developer far better than me and moved my product forward. I encourage everybody to try it out, but only if you are really stuck and have exhausted all other resources.
Not reading any startup news — bye techcrunch…
What also helped tremendously to concentrate on working, was restricting time spent on different startup websites like techcrunch, producthunt and so on. As I suffer from the shiny thing syndrome I get discouraged and unsecured very fast and looking at apps the same age as mine raising millions of $ was something that did not help my working mentality. I followed a few product makers that advocate bootstrapping like levels.io or Patrick McKenzie on twitter, but that’s about it. I started using this strategy when I was more active on Instagram. The more I looked at other peoples Instagram feeds, the unhappier I was with my own life. As soon as I stopped using Instagram my mood and happiness went up, same seems to be true for the startup life.
What happens now
Honestly I have no idea. And as I see it that is my biggest mistake so far. I wanted to test out some ideas and one of the rules for me to pursue an idea was a clear execution plan and well defined target customer. Now here I am, I have a vague idea who might be interested (professional bloggers, authors and startups with a content first strategy) and have tried reaching them but with little success so far.
Get Beta Users
Courtland Allen from indiehackers.com had a great quote on twitter the other day that really resonated with me:
That is my plan for the next couple of days. I want to have at least 5 active beta user that try out my app and give me some form of feedback, be it through twitter, mail or a Skype call. As I have no idea on how to get them I will try “direct” sales by directly reaching out to bloggers and startups via twitter and email. I do not really like this tactic as it comes across a little spamy but at this point I have no better idea.
Launch on Product Hunt
While it seems obvious I wanted to explore other forms of getting users that is more long term oriented. But since I am lacking any good ideas that will be my main goal after acquiring my beta users and incorporating their feedback into my app.
At this point I still feel that the app is to simple and lacks features to be successful on Producthunt, but I have nothing to lose.
How you can help
Please visit my app at www.stairway.io and let me know any bugs, feedback or feature requests. When we are on producthunt you could help by up-voting . You can also follow me on twitter here: https://twitter.com/jrmarciniak
Usually when you are done with building the MVP, the real work should begin. In the past that is usually where I stopped abruptly. I hope that will not be the case now and you can help me with, that by reminding to continue working.
