Are you building in public? Drop what you are working on and one lesson learned from your journey!

Sharath Kuruganty
82 replies

Replies

Björn Morén
I'm building a gym workout app, and I did a soft launch already, but working on improvements. https://athletium.app I've learned that marketing is much harder than I thought.
Björn Morén
@alex_hw Thanks Alex, you make great points. It was also a way for me to stay more focused in product development. I took the decision after I tested a lot of fitness apps and realized that no one has built an app that I personally would want to use. I saw that there is a space here that no one occupies. There are hundreds generic fitness apps, so I would stand no chance if I made yet another one.
Carsten Pleiser
@bjorn_moren What does your product do exactly?
Björn Morén
@ckpleiser Hi Carsten. It is an app where you can plan and log your gym workouts. It is not the typical fitness app, but for more advanced and more motivated athletes, who like to experiment with their training. People who have the mindset of competitive bodybuilders and powerlifters.
Alex Höpker
@bjorn_moren I think it's great that you are targeting such a specific niche (bodybuilders & powerlifters). Marketing and working with a very specific group in my experience is helpful for several reason: - you'll know fairly quick if you are actually solving a problem for this group (if you talk to them and let them try out your product) - creating a brand and marketing is a lot easier with a specific target group in mind - Often the group that you are not specifically targeting (e.g. the casual gym visitor, hobby-lifter) will also listen and be interested
Philipp Stelzel
I was writing a SEO E-Book in the last months. Lesson? Connect with people. 10 deep connections are worth more than 100 superficial followers
Mekkie Bansil
@philipp_stelzel Would love to get this on nonfik’s platform and help get you more traction!
Ivanna Wendel
We are working on LabiOffice - suite of apps to Build, Manage & Grow an eCommerce business. And launching our mobile app on Product Hunt tomorrow for LabiDesk.com - help desk software :) Our lesson 👉 Plan out iterations thoroughly, don't jump at everything at once, there is always gonna be something to add!
Abraham Samma
Working on a distributed, offline first wiki platform: https://oneplaybook.app. We've learned a lot about SEO while building it. Easier AND harder than you think 😂
Sam Smith
Working on creating highlight-reel summaries from Zoom demos. (Creating a video & powerpoint with the highlights, sending it as follow-up). Honestly biggest learning is video is hard, lol. App is DemoTime. Running pilots soon(tm).
Tiagorbf
I am building a virtual co-working space for bootstrappers (https://wannabe-entrepreneur.com...) and my lesson is that paying members are actually much more active and engaged than on-paying ones
Andrew Israel
We are working on PropelAuth (https://www.propelauth.com) - an end-to-end auth service which includes first-class support for onboarding your customer's teams. We used to have a broader focus (you can even see it in our PH launch where we were auth for anyone), but we focused more on a specific segment, B2B customers, and people respond way better on sales calls.
Titus Mukiria
@andrew_israel I'm going to recommend your business to the marketing staff at my job I like the product so far wish you all the best of luck.
Scott Vayner
Hey folks. I am building CrowdPower (https://crowdpower.io) in public - a user engagement tool for SaaS products. You can follow me on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/@scottinpublic One lesson I have learned is I've been able to get hundreds of people to buy a lifetime deal, but it is difficult to find the customers willing to pay monthly. I blame that on distribution. LTD platforms can get the word out to thousands of users for you quickly. As a result, I feel like it is possible to make more money selling a micro-SaaS that is easy to build and cheap to run as an LTD vs. going after MRR. I did end all my LTDs as I look to the next phase of growth, but I may dabble with a different product one day.
Joshua Dance
I am building https://thisappwillgiveyouabs.co... One lesson learned: Make something useful, and make it findable, and they will find it. I have done minimal marketing and monthly users keeps climbing. This is not 'build it and they will come'. More like 'make it useful and make it findable via SEO'.
Xavier Coiffard
I'm building https://focusplus.io in public. Biggest lesson: UI always take much longer than expected 😁
Sławomir Pawlak
@angezanetti That's only true if you care! :D Interesting product! Btw, images IMPROVE YOUR WORKFLOW section look really blurry, I thought I'll give some feedback here ;p
Carsten Pleiser
@angezanetti But it's also sooo important
Aurelio
Building: https://wp-umbrella.com Key learning: being customer centric requires A LOT of discipline!
Charles Weill
I'm building https://creatorml.com to help YouTuber Creators optimize their titles and thumbnails using the power of machine learning. I'm currently building in public on both Twitter and YouTube. I've learned that sharing one tweet per day about what I've learned, and making one video per week on YouTube is an incredible way to grow one's audience. The compounding is real.
Anurag Singh
@charlesweill could you share your twitter - will be good to checkout the content you've been posting.. thats an ideal way to help others too.
Jim Morrison
Hey @5harath 👋 - we're building a Twitter game called twiDAQ. Launching on here in a few hours ( https://www.producthunt.com/post... 🚀 ) so I'll be sure to come back and let you know what we learn!!
Jim Morrison
Hey @5harath - So the learning is going on right now! We're live ☝️ and just about on the homepage (right down at the bottom)... but folks are trying the game which is a great start! I'll let you know as the day goes on what changes. 👍
Bryce Murray
Working on Halo - a tool for early-stage investors and for founders. We've launched a waitlist for founders and are heavily developing to ensure founders have as much value-added as possible through our product. For founders, Halo is a coaching and development tool, creating clarity by identifying inherent strengths and revealing which habits may derail the success of their startup. Founders up for the waitlist here: https://t.co/Ekju54GABh
Tek Log
Intelligent Email Marketing - No website, Name -GoArjun , just very beginning. Main intention is learning AI, ML applied to marketing. Lets see how it goes. Will gather more steam like challenge myself to build the initial MVP in 90 DAYS starting April 2022.
Shravan Shandilya
I'm building Liveweb (https://liveweb.space). It helps makers to go live on their website during their product hunt launch. My biggest learning has been to keep a solid short-term and long-term targets that are measurable. Building anything new is already chaotic, without any proper target, it would create so much noise that I wouldn't know what was happening.
Currently Building https://www.collabclub.co/ a platform to barter/exchange time for the skills you need. Building with 7 others as a community project as part of the Wannabe Entrepreneur Community Our Lesson is that it's challenging to build as a group of strangers!
Wim Cools
Building https://thymer.com in public - an editor/IDE for tasks & planning. The biggest lesson is rather meta: it's that _not_ building in public is really playing the startup game in hard mode. We've built our first product in the proverbial basement, never really sharing much about the process itself. It all worked out in the end, but it feels like everything goes much faster taking the public route. When we launched our first product, we didn't have any audience. We also launched on PH and managed to rank pretty well, but with 0 followers at the time, there is nobody to ask for feedback, nobody who will spread the word for you. Everything grew organically or through SEO, which worked for us but takes a long time. This time around we're sharing all our lessons and in return already have people following the project and giving feedback, which is a lot more fun too ;)
Patricia
We're working on Kairn, a productivity app to help people and their teams achieve their boldest goals & feel fulfilled (https://kairn.app/). Biggest lesson 👉 community is key. Building genuine connections and having people to talk about your product is way more powerful than any content you'll create yourself.
Alejandra Cienfuegos
I am working on a Business Plan template in Notion that is shareable and interactive. All my building process is on a Twitter thread. What I learned was that even if the launching date can change, it is better to have a deadline public for people following the journey, mostly to not lose momentum.