What I learned building an app this summer
See Pilot on Product Hunt!
This summer a buddy of mine, Daniel, and I talked about how we weren’t satisfied with how we got our tech news. There were either too many features on one app or not our preferred sources. A summer project was born. We decided to quickly build something that we wanted to use ourselves. We borrowed the Tinder UI, added our favorite tech sources, and called it Pilot. Swipe articles left to discard and swipe right to save for later, and you’ll never see the same article twice. As we all know, things always cost twice as much and take twice as long. We both have experienced this with past startups, @Fuund & @Launchsite. We knew costs were not an issue since all resources were embodied within our two man team, but time would definitely need to be managed properly. We were able to build Pilot within 3 months with another project on our table. It wasn’t as quick as we would have liked, but reflecting back on our circumstances and it being our first project together, it is decent. Those 3 months were packed with start up and product lessons. It never seems to amaze me how true Paul Graham’s theory on startups being counter intuitive is. Being an entrepreneur and product creator takes discipline and the maintaining of a clear vision on what you are trying to accomplish.
Here is what we learned while building Pilot;
1. Build for you
Bringing value to people is tougher than it sounds- so first thing for us was to bring value to ourselves. While keeping this focus, it helped us overcome many common mistakes most fall victim to. If we were building something users wouldn’t like, we would know right away because we are our own users.
This really helped with the UX because we understood what processes we wanted and the flows we would take. At the end of the day, we built Pilot for us. Traction or no traction — we will still run it for ourselves.
2. Build in the open
Building in public helps early users buy in and feel like they own the product. Then when the launch comes around, your product will have evangelist users all ready to go. This is what we could have done much better with Pilot. We should have reached out to contacts and the tech community for early feedback rather than sitting in a closed room with no feedback along the way. Daniel and I have begun a more ambitious project and have grabbed a base of 15 feedback users, with 5 interviews conducted within a week. See the post by Ryan Hoover (creator of ProductHunt), Why You Should Build Your Product in Public for more meat on this subject.
3. Keep it simple
The more we worked on Pilot, the more excited we got. But with excitement came the negative side effects. We got too ambitious with visions of feature grandeur and fell victim to feature creep.
“Add this….” “This would be cool….” “What if it did this?”
Within a week, our simple tinder for news turned into Frankenstein. I knew something was wrong because I would go home and still use Feedly to read the news. I wasn’t using my own product and that was the reason we were even doing this. So we went back to the drawing board and pretty much started back at the beginning. Simply Tinder for best tech news. After a redesign and stripping of random unnecessary features, we reached a product we were comfortable with. We both found ourselves waking up in the morning, checking the news with Pilot. Success. It all circles back to adding value. Their are plenty of ideas and features that work in theory, but in action they are useless. The secret is to find your minimal viable product and keep it only to that.
Been using Pilot privately amongst friends for the past month and just now releasing it to public. Please give it a download and try it out @Pilot. Would love feedback! Tweet @ me
iOS
Android
I think we did alright for ourselves, and more importantly we have a better understanding of how well we work together. We have now decided to continue to work on some more ambitious projects together called Launchsite. A platform tailored to the commercial real estate industry — More info coming in a post soon.
PS. We also built another app this summer which grants users an easier way to sift through videos on YouTube. More coming on this app and what was learned soon. Thanks for reading!
@npearsonwright
