What are your top challenges while building a new product and or a feature?
Nikita Kanade
13 replies
How are you currently tackling them?
Replies
Pavel Osadchuk@xakpc
Balance between "it's working" and "it's perfect"
Share
Finding a co-founder can be tough. I'm technical but often times not technical for everything I want to build
@aaronoleary Jason Calacanis has a Slack channel called "This Week In Startups". It has a sub channel called cofoundersearch.
I find it particularly hard to get enough quality beta users to validate the product or feature ideas. When I was developing my latest product, the Personality Reveal, I didn't know whether people will like it at all. The beta user feedback was critical. I tackled this by launching into beta very early and tried to acquire as many beta users as I could through direct chat messages in Instagram. I found out that only if you build a personal relationship with someone on Instagram, they'll answer your surveys and give you the feedback you need. Mass mailing, betalist.com or other methods never really worked for me.
@felixmelchner That problem definitely resonates with me. I'd love to learn more about the process you used to find and nurture the leads for your beta list via instagram. Not much of a social media user myself, but will probably need to acquire some beta users from there for a project I'm working on, so your learnings would be valuable.
@felixmelchner @raunaqvaisoha When I see that people follow my profile or like my photos, I try to engage with them by asking them questions. E.g. where did you hear about my project? Have you done xy before? So I start to build up a conversation before I ask them to go to website. And, most importantly, I ask them if they have time to leave their feedback in my survey, even before I send anything. If they say yes, it's very likely they will actually give you feedback.
This worked for me so far.. but it also takes a lot of time. It's definitely not scalable.
For me, as simple as it sounds, validating the product hypothesis quickly is a big challenge. I've used resources like the MOM test by Rob Fitzpatrick to improve my customer interviews, but sometimes it's hard to predict whether the product is a hit or a miss in its first few versions. Especially if it's in a new product category.
Finding the right no-code tool to build my app. I’m going solo and don’t have much programming knowledge. There just isn’t a comprehensive guide to what you can and can’t do with the available no-code tools out there.
@yochevedb I developed one important no-code tool. It lets you create APIs without coding. Check it out at wirespec.dev
Launching soon!
Building a new product is innovative! It might have some troubling thoughts and sleepless nights but the pain is worth it.
Initially, the dilemma was about the success or failure ratio of the product. The next challenge I faced was finding a team of like-minded people; it is time-consuming. Once you get the right team, you can not immediately start working. You have to explain the procedure, take their inputs, and be part of discussions, sometimes an entire team gets tangled in doing a SWOT analysis of the product and strategies.
Launching a new product is time taking process, we can not hurry it! Eventually, if you have planned everything well with some backups and have funded every step rationally, there are chances that the end result will be positive!
From the little experience I have i would say one of the biggest challenge is getting that motivation to improve the product after most of the work is done. Maybe it is the 80:20 rule, but once the product is almost ready, you would think. The pace of development and progress decreases and so does the motivation and then it is a vicious cycle.