Ask HN: I keep doing the same thing over and over, how do I change?
1) Build product
2) Get a few paying customers
3) Start working on improving it for customers
4) Realize product is bloated or is pretty lacking in features.
5) Build more features.
6) No increase in sales, keeps building
7) Gets tired, refund users, abandon working on it.
8) Starts hating 9-5 job, repeat the whole cycle again.
Is my problem, finding a market fit first? I automatically assumed that because of poor sales, I must be lacking in features so I immediately start building. But I get really burnt out by doing this. I almost always end up refunding my customers because I realize what I spent months building is lacking.
The biggest problem I have is, when I start to make incremental changes to the product, I keep having the urge to restart from scratch. However, it's a huge time sink to do this again and again (4 times already). I'm beginning to think this is just an issue with me.
I'm basically in my fourth iteration and I think it's finally clicking. Something is deadly wrong with my thought process.
Any insight would help.
I built the product. I built the website. I got a few customers. Then I get burnt out building more features or making it "perfect". Then I can't work on it anymore and so I look for a job.
After 4 years, I either introduce a change in my process and turn this into a sustainable income or I just give up completely.
16 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 58.3 ms ] threadStart building into your workflow a regular evaluation of "Do my users seriously love this feature? Does it engender a strong positive emotional reaction for a significant fraction of people?" If the answer to that is "no", then kill it. Remove it from the UI and rip the code out of your codebase. As a side benefit, you'll have less of an urge to rewrite from scratch all the time, because the codebase will be smaller and more manageable.
I hope that helps a bit, Martin
http://unicornfree.com/2013/how-do-you-create-a-product-peop...
If not: I think you'll find find the HN community doesn't react well to either stealing content or complaining about the (quite reasonable, in this case) cost of people's products.
If yes, then you should have worked more on sales and marketing.
If no, then you built the wrong feature. Blindly adding a collection of features won't help. You need to figure out what the one feature is that will make customers rave about the product.
The core problem might be that your product ideas were "pretty good" ideas and not "very good" ideas. "Pretty good" ideas are deadly, because they are just good enough to suck you in, but not good enough to make a product that customers rave about, and thus not good enough to make with a product that is easy to market or spread by word of mouth.
My product was similar to others already existing.
If you get tired of working on a profitable side project - sell it! Don't refund users or abandon it. There are lots of people that would like to get started and learn from an existing product.
Decide what is the most enjoyable part for you. Finding the idea, building it, solving problems, selling? Try to do that more.
Maybe you end up building SasS products for other people, partnering on a project you really love.
Like you say, you can't keep doing the same thing over and over and expect different results. The only reason to do something over and over is if you enjoy it.
From the outside, it seems likely that you have the common developer mentality of "If I build it, the customers will come."
If a business does not have a reliable, repeatable way to acquire customers profitably then any success they may have is based on luck. It is much easier to just try to code that problem away, but likely you need to step away from the code and start talking to customers so you can find out what they really care about and where you can find more people like them.
I'm working on discovering channels and selling to that niche. One way is linkedin but it's a tough sell.