What was your most expensive business or marketing mistake? Story time.
When I think about my most expensive marketing mistake, I don’t really measure it in money, but rather in time.
About 7 years ago, I was thinking about creating content and had to decide whether I wanted to create for the Slovak market or for an international audience.
I was afraid my English wasn’t good enough. So I chose the smaller, local market.
At the time, Slovakia had around 5 million people, and the potential audience was still quite limited, even with Czech speakers. (Our languages are pretty similar.)
And then I spent 3 years creating content almost exclusively for the Slovak market.
I could see limited results, was stagnating and could not see any progress. And then the founder of minimalist phone, Martin, said to me: “You have good content on Instagram. Why aren’t you doing this for the international market?”… that’s when I felt nudged and got the courage to move on.
It was the time when I:
started creating on Product Hunt,
received support,
reached a much larger audience,
started getting better-paid collaborations.
Looking back, my biggest mistake was fear of *NOT BEING TOO GOOD FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MARKET.”
I burned time, and it cost me money through opportunities I never got.
What was your most expensive business or marketing mistake?
Replies
My most expensive mistake is always launching too late. I enjoy programming, and I tend to keep adding features and refining design details. On the other hand, I fear the launch moment and the possibility that perhaps no one will be interested.
I have to force myself to build something imperfect that just works: the Minimum Viable Product MVP. Get feedback fast and then keep improving the product.
On the other hand, it seems that is not compatible with what I see here at PH. If I understand, you can only launch once every few months. So...
In PH Is it better to launch only when the product is quite refined?
@narcismirandes very relatable. Same experience.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@narcismirandes Perfection kills the action :) I should also launch soon to confirm whether I built somehing useful :)
Mine was probably spending too much time building before proving enough demand. I kept thinking better features, automation, dashboards, and systems would unlock growth, when the harder problem was actually distribution and getting people to pay. The cost wasn’t just money, it was months of engineering time I could have spent talking to customers earlier.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@harjobandeepsingh Distribution has become the only thing that matters now (to stand out), because almost everyone can copy the product and features. :)
@busmark_w_nika Exactly. I agree distribution matters a lot now, especially because AI makes copying ideas and features much easier.
But copying a feature is not the same as copying the product. Quality, UX, reliability, speed, brand, community, and how well everything works together are much harder to replicate.
We’ve seen this so many times. Lots of companies copy successful features, but very few manage to copy the actual experience people love.
So I think the game is becoming: build well, then distribute even better.
Softorino 💻📲
Mine is measured the same way. I picked a Sunday, the launch wasn't featured, and a product only gets one launch day, so there's no version where I run it again properly.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@yelyzaveta_kibets will you try any different day or approach?
Softorino 💻📲
@busmark_w_nika Midweek, because on a Sunday nobody who would have commented is at their desk, so the page sits with nothing on it and the next visitor reads that as dead. The bigger change is the approach: I treated the launch as the event, when the part I can still act on afterwards is the pages. That is where the work has gone since.
Great question. When I was building the Enterprise Automation Suite, when it was just supposed to be a quick script, but it was not the massive miss of my estimate of the project size vs actual. It was during the process of discovering it would be over 12 months of refinement where I should have realized my error. In fact 3-6 months of not seeing it I would still consider reasonable or fair.
it wasn't until I started hitting a crash crunch that I realized I should have already been marketing the product and the brand, getting interest with teasers and curiosity. There was opportunity to start the funnel earlier and more effectively. Furthermore, It would be 10 months of development, 6 months of USING part of the tool before I realized that a sub-component was already providing me with massive value. I had missed the MVP right under my nose and had been using it for 10 months while still viewing it as a just a module function. I then developed the code recorder as a standalone product refining and mastering the UI. I'd have to manually add multiple generation of logs together to get an accurate picture but it must be at least 20,000 revisions, and possibly more like 30,000 test uses. Before having a single customer or non-founder user.
Missing this MVP as a real value add, is the difference between launching an AI code recorder before Claude Code and before Codex. If I had developed this first, it would have automatically been a massive contender in the elevated vibe coaching space. I still think its going to add great value for those looking to use a different model without that capability or running local models, but if I was out before those 2 services, it would have been much easier to build the brand than it is going to be now. But I don't know what this mistake cost me, because its missed opportunity cost, not cash out of pocket.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@roman_kiefer But when you convert your missed time into money, it is still a cost :)
@roman_kiefer I’ve been building RiiS, a citizen journalism app, for quite a long time and I also kept improving it before feeling ready to launch.At some point I realized that if I waited until everything felt perfect, I might never launch at all. I think the product should be solid enough that people can understand the idea and use the core experience without friction, but it doesn’t need to be finished.
For me, the real test now is whether people actually find it useful — and that’s something I can only learn by putting it in front of them.
Mine was treating a job change as a clean slate for my own products. I run Oshylabs alongside full time work, and every time I assumed a new role would free up hours to ship faster, the ramp up ate the time I had earmarked for the business instead. Cost me about four months on the last one. Now I plan against the assumption that any new job costs me six weeks before I get anything back, and I do not commit to a launch date until that window has passed.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@oshylabs I have my fingers crossed for your projects, it seems that you have a big scope of work.
@busmark_w_nika Appreciate that. Some weeks the scope shows more than others, it forces me to be honest about what actually needs building versus what just looks good on a roadmap. Thanks for following along.
I made a similar mistake with RiiS. When I started building the app, I thought the best way to test the idea was to focus on Barcelona first and expand later.
But eventually, I realized I was trying to fit a global idea into one city. RiiS is a citizen journalism app for seeing what’s happening around the world through people who are actually there. Limiting it to Barcelona changed the whole vision, so I had to rethink and rebuild much of the app. It cost me a lot of time.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@marina_neparidze are you gonna launch it here?
@busmark_w_nika Yes! I’m launching RiiS here next Tuesday, September 15. It’s my first Product Hunt launch, so I’m a little nervous.After working on it for so many months, I’m really curious to see whether I’ve built something people will actually want to use. I’d really love to hear your feedback when it goes live.