Building a product (III)

Unfreeze and iterate

I was scared to show my minimum viable product (MVP) to the world. I was terrified to not get it right on the first try, and I had nightmares about not hitting bullseye on my first shot. Those feelings kept me from launching and pushed me to lie to myself. “It’s not ready, it’s not feature-complete” I thought, but then again I only wanted a minimum viable product. What’s the point of the MVP if it’s not minimum?

Some people had a look at it and recommended that I did this or that. They also suggested different features and why the current status of the product wasn’t mature. Of fucking course it’s not mature, it’s an MVP. You probably need 100x the money and 10x the time to get a mature product.

I showed my product to the world. I expected lots of traffic, emails to answer, architectures to scale and customers requesting more features. I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to cope with the sheer amount of work that was coming to me. I didn’t want to disappoint my users…

but the world gave exactly zero flying fucks about my product. Oh boy.

One, maybe two days of disappointment, then it clicked. Try again, try harder. Have another look at your proposal, have another look at your product. How is it perceived? Identify what does not work. Change it.

That was my new motivator. Learn why this didn’t work, learn to be on my customers’ shoes. Iterate, get better, improve.

Success, even overnight success, doesn’t happen overnight.

It requires effort and persistence. Work extra hard on getting your first users and learn from them. Knock on people’s doors. Approach them one by one.

When I was a kid, I remember I had this feeling where my friends and I would discover a new competitive game or video-game, and I’ll end up thinking I’ve ruined it because I learned how to win. I studied the game, I tried different tactics, tried to bend the rules, push them to the limit.

Once a crack was found I will push and push until I just didn’t win but dominated. Then it wasn’t fun anymore.

It didn’t work. What’s the point on clinging onto it? Carry on, get your next move ready, give it another shot. This time you’ll be wiser.

“Building a product” series.

I’m writing these articles as a way to record and share my learning, while I try to reinvent myself.

This is the third article in the series, and these are the two previous:

Building a product (I) — Or how I’m moving from a job to a career

Building a product (II) — Riding the emotional roller-coaster while trying to define my product

These are part of my experiences while building Wormhole, a cloud virtual networking solution that empowers you to extend your private networks between different cloud and hosting providers.

If you haven’t tried it yet, you should, it’s fucking awesome.