Over the last 2 weeks, my cofounder (Tyler) and I (Nikita) built an app called Figment.so which turns Figma designs into functional websites.We brutally tailored our strategy so that we'd run as lean as possible, and 2 weeks after we started building we made our first $25. I think we did a lot of things right, and a few things wrong. Sharing the lessons here 👇🏻Right: Brutal optimizationWe told each other that we would try to optimize our approach to the extreme, to get market validation and paying users as soon as possible. This means we:Built only what we needed to show the idea was possibleDidn't use any existing (and complicated) open source website buildersBuilt our editor from scratch specifically to receive Figma exports.The rule was: if a feature could wait - it would.Lesson: Moving fast > moving right.Right: Brutal organizationIn order to Brutally optimize, you need to brutally organize. We set up a notion and threw everything we knew we had to do at some point into it. Then, we probably spent ~30 minutes a day grooming tasks and throwing them into the backlog if we didn't deem them to be critical for our first user to enjoy the service.Our biggest two priorities were no bugs, and simplicity.Lesson: Always have a kanban board.Wrong: Getting lost in the buildI personally suffered from "developer mindset". I had an unbearable desire to code things the right way, which led to lengthy planning sessions and over-optimization of the development environment.It's possible we could've moved even faster, though I'm sure we dodged some rework through this, so not a terrible time sink. I'm also very confident in the build when it comes to expansibility and organization, which makes the developer in me very happy.Lesson: Re-eval & workaround the issue if it takes longer than 30m and isn't critical.Right: Prioritizing marketing over a finished productA big priority for us was to make a launch video and landing page so we can start showing people. By doing this and Tweeting about it we built a waitlist of roughly 18 people and 1 conversion.We also set up analytics and events on all our button hovers and clicks to see our funnel drop-off from landing page to conversion.Actually, this comment on @thisiskp_'s post earned us a ton of waitlist sign ups and drove our first conversion.https://twitter.com/nikita_builds/status/1427743211305455626We definitely got lucky with timing since KP is big in the no-code space and commenting earned us tons of engagement.Lesson: Piggy-back off of big posts. Tell EVERYONE about your product.Wrong: Not marketing enoughAn 18 person waitlist and 1 conversion is good for an idea we had 3 weeks ago, but we could have definitely done better by posting more on other platforms, and reaching out to more people.There was definitely a part of me that held back due to not having a live product, which goes back to developer mindset.Lesson: Tell EVERYONE what your product is and will be. charge fast, refund fast.Right: Having a co-founderI built solo for a long time, and I got to ~$1400 MRR that way. But running solo means everything takes 4x as long (returns of a co-founder are exponential). It also means motivating yourself is 10x harder.Tyler and I met through Twitter DMs and still haven't ever met each other in real life. But our work ethics match, and coming from running solo I was surprised how easy it was to work on Figment, especially when I saw Tyler was working.But just motivation isn't even scratching the surface. We saw tons of advantages in divide and conquering, coming at problems with different perspectives, doubling our Twitter reach, etc.That's about it for now, I hope to post another thread when we cross $100 MRR.Let me know in the replies 👇🏻 what you think about brutal optimization vs doing things the right way first time around, it may come back to bite us in the a** but for now we both feel confident in the journey so far.Finally, feel free to DM me on Twitter if you want to ask any questions or chat about your product.Feel free to follow us on Twitter as we'll be sharing our build in public updates more frequently there!@nikita_builds - myself.@tknndy - my co-founder.@useFigment - Figment's Twitter. see hubwealthy.com/wealthy
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