Elliott Reed

So, I'm about to launch my second product, which in my head I felt was a unique offering. As part of the work to try and get community engagement pre-launch I started exploring certain Red-colour forums to get feedback and understand user engagement, but what actually happened was a complete pile-on on the apparent unoriginal-ness of my product, etc.

I get that everyone has their own opinion, and I do not generally engage with trolls, but sometimes it's hard to ignore it, especially when you're 1-2 weeks out from your product launch, and then doubt kicks in.

Early on, we spent a lot of time trying to sell into a market built around long-standing vendor relationships.

When security and trust are involved, being the new company in the room is a pretty big disadvantage. Even if the product is good, getting an institution to switch is a whole different problem.

So we changed direction. Instead of selling to the institution, we started going directly to the people who would actually use the product.

It's definitely a slower path. We're building trust one person at a time instead of closing one deal that could potentially bring in thousands of users.

I use AI for a lot of things now, especially when I m building something on my own.

But I noticed there are still some things I just prefer doing myself.

For me, one of them is figuring out the initial UX and structure. If I ask AI too early, I sometimes end up thinking around what it suggested instead of exploring the problem myself.

So lately I ve been trying to think through the first direction on my own, then bring AI in.