I'm struggling
Trey Winterbourne
3 replies
Hey,
I've been working on a SaaS product for around 8 months, but I'm struggling.
It's open source, and we've had nearly 40 contributors with 800+ commits! But we've made little progress. I've worked on the project on average 2 hours a day. We've got a few core features, not too well polished, and have a few ideas for what needs to be added to step up the game.
But every new feature feels daunting. Feels like I'm just going to add more and more rubbish code, and add more and more bugs. (we have... a lot of bugs since we stopped adding tests).
Yeah that's right, I stopped adding tests. I got to the point where I felt like development was too slow, so tried to speed it up by ditching common practices and even stopped writing tests. Well there's mistake number 1.
Since then we've added a few cool features, but they're buggy, we don't know if they work properly, and it's honestly STILL not moving enough. I've came to product hunt to see others products, and support them. But it's just making me realise more and more how rubbish mine is.
How can I get out of this spiral? Any tips or past experiences you guys have had with this? I'd be happy to answer any questions, thanks for taking the time to read my start to a journey, you guys have some incredible products!
Replies
Arjun Acharya@arjun_acharya
Hey Trey,
Im glad you have started your journey and still pursued it. Kudos to that. I would say you took way too long to have an MVP ready. I feel the rule of thumb for this is not more than a month or a couple of developments before you get live users to test it out. Otherwise, you will never know if people like your product or not and it might so be that after 8 months of development, no one uses it entirely. So I would say lock your MVP immediately and do a soft launch in your peer group - friends to get a feel of what is needed. You already have a solid team so when u feel confident of the MVP - launch it to live users and get feedback. A product's life cycle doesn't end after a launch. Its just the beginning and people will love to hang on to choppy code if it serves a purpose and they see potential.
All the best! And keep us posted!
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Hi again @arjun_acharya,
Thank you for the motivation!
I found what I've been chasing is the "MVP launch" for the last 3 months. We've had a start to the product for a while, a hosted version, that "works". But i've found every time I bring ideas to anyone close (a few of our target customers too) they say that we're lacking so many core things.
So I find myself in the loop of thinking that it's not good enough for a MVP, and it's not really a viable product. Yeah there's some features that work, but it's still nothing interested so I worry that this will just end up being worse.
But I definitely agree, we've took way too long to get anything out there. I've felt myself looped away and just need to break out and take a risk.
Maybe my next step should be pausing feature development and just get this current version out and available and get some proper customer feedback.
Thank you for the support, I appreciate the tips.
I'll definitely keep you posted, hopefully I start to make progress rather than carrying on this product/progress hell so I can start making posts about the application!
Cheers Arjun :)