A few months ago, my friend and I both walked away from lucrative/stable developer jobs to start our own startup. A week ago, we launched the first version of our product Metriport (https://metriport.ai/) and were (thankfully) already able to acquire our first few hundred users. Now we are here, and wanted to share some of our lessons learned along the way:Unexpectedly, the biggest challenge so far has been managing our own psychology. We were already used to working 80+ hour weeks, however we did not expect to deal with such a profound mental shift with regards to work. The uncertainty of every step along the way is a constant anxiety going on in the back of our minds, and we are both starting to feel the effects of burnout. It’s hard to really appreciate the saying “starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss”, until you try and start a company. Typing this out even seems a bit absurd, considering we’re really just making an app at the end of the day and aren’t doing something like running billion dollar factories!Guerrilla marketing > paid ads (for now, anyways). In the past couple weeks, we spent a bit of money (<$300 USD) on YouTube, Instagram, and Apple Search ads. So far, none of these are proving to be as effective as manually reaching out to people/communities who may be interested in the product we have built. Concretely, we can attribute only about ~10% of our total downloads to paid ads. It may be too early to tell, and also may be due to our lack of paid marketing experience, however for now our perception is that early community building is a must before even thinking about dropping serious cash on paid ads. This may be obvious to some, but we were naive in thinking that we could just throw money at ads to start gaining traction early on.A tiny team can outperform a large team. As per the title, it took two of us to build Metriport from the ground up in 11 weeks. Yesterday, to our surprise, we found another startup working on a product has a lot of similarities to what we’ve built. How did we find the startup? A few of their executives signed up for our app! We scoped them out, and found that they have 25+ board/team members (many of whom are MBAs/PHDs and the like), have been developing their app for over 2 years, and haven’t even launched past their beta version yet. It will be interesting to keep an eye on them for sure, but by all objective measures our output turned out to be superior to theirs, with a fraction of the resource input.Work/life balance can quickly become unbalanced. We found that it becomes very easy to neglect things in your life that aren’t explicitly related to working on your product. Especially if you work from home, the lines between life and work blur over time. Since launching, our workload has essentially doubled, as we now are accountable to many more things outside continued app development. Believe it or not, but having a full day to just sit down and code feels like a vacation in comparison to all the other stuff. We’re finding that working a lot is easy, but fitting in things like regular exercise into our schedules takes even more discipline.Ironically, we’ll be using our own app to get our physical and mental health back on track in the coming weeks. We have been actively tracking things like our caffeine intake, sleep, and work hours in Metriport. We originally built the app with self-improvement in mind, so looks like the hard work paid off, as we get to use it for free 😅If there are any other first time tech entrepreneurs out there, we’d love to hear about your experiences launching a product! Whether it’s stories regarding health or technical challenges, advice for marketing, or anything else, we’d love to hear from you! see hubwealthy.com/wealthy
0 comments:
Post a Comment