(3/3) — I spent 9 months building a B2C app full-time, here are 19 things I learned.
I am a first-time entrepreneur from Germany with a semi-technical background building a tech product. Around 5k users gave knugget a squeeze and we are currently at 80 DAUs — slowly but steadily decreasing… So, things don’t go particularly well. This what I learned so far! (Part 3 of 3)
In the 1st part I reflected on learnings I clustered as Entrepreneurial Skills(⚙️) and in the 2nd part I wrote about my learnings as a first-time Product Manager(💻).
In this the last part of this little blog post series I am dealing with one of the key skills of entrepreneurship: Decision-Making (🧠).
It’s part of the job to make many decisions and that naturally comes along with making many wrong decisions. Entrepreneurship is characterized by scarcity: time, money and data are short which makes it difficult to make informed decisions.
In a large enterprise, you can afford spending months and tens of thousands of dollars on research to inform a decision. If you try to do the same as a founder you run out of money or your window of opportunity is shut. We have to move fast. But how fast is too fast?
🛑🧠 Mistake 1: I wanted to move fast which led to poor decision quality.
When it comes to patience, I am pulling from two opposite directions:
I know that there is no such thing as overnight success and am happy to make baby steps in the right direction. At the same time, as soon as I open Notion, I feel that I am wasting my time when I don’t immediately start working on something.
The action bias led to me making lots of decisions by gut feeling. I think this is not necessarily a mistake, because often what feels right is the right decision — but having experience in a field is what separates deciding from guessing.
Directed speed is earned through years of experience. Before that, getting the direction right is more productive than coming up to the right speed. This, I guess, happens automatically the closer you get to Product-Market-Fit.
🟢🧠 Learning 1: Taking time to make the right call beats moving fast by jumping to conclusions.
🛑🧠 Mistake 2: Common-sensing too much.
Once the tasks piled up, I reduced the amount of time I spent learning from blog articles and other resources to almost 0.
In many cases it might have come in useful to take sufficient time to first smarten up, instead of jumping right into the tasks and common-sensing it.
It can be annoying and confusing to go through lengthy tutorials or numerous methods to achieve X or Y. Going with the common sense is fast and easy.
However, it creates path dependency, especially if others are affected by the decision: It makes it more difficult to switch lanes. On top of that, building the decision-making on a proven process or a best case example can prevent making mistakes others made already. The outcome can be substantially better.
🟢🧠️ Learning 2: Schedule time to learn before jumping into something new. Don’t wing it (too often).
🛑🧠 Mistake 3: I did not write my reasoning down to review it later on.
Instead of going by gut decisions, every time I face a decision I should take a step back to think. Think and write, to be precise, write down the answers to these questions:
- What is the desired outcome?
- What are my options?
- Is there an “out of the box”-type of option?
- How is the outcome of each option bringing us closer to the overarching goal?
- Why do I believe the desired outcome will happen?
- What happens if it does not?
- How do I feel about the decision right now and why?
I set up a decision-making journal in Notion, a simple table with a few date fields. When I am in the process of making a decision, I write down the answers to these questions and set a reminder date to evaluate this decision 8–12 weeks later, depending on the nature and magnitude of the decision.
Never judge a decision by it’s outcome. Judge it by the decision-making process. — Rolf Dobelli
Going through this process makes it easier for me to make decisions, stick with them and explain them to others. In the long run, I hope this will significantly increase the quality of my decisions, as I get the chance to recognize flaws and fallacies in my decision-making process.
🟢🧠 Learning 3: Block time to make decisions and maintain a decision-making diary to refer to down the road.
What now?
Looking back on this long list of mistakes, I could feel bad about it — it obviously doesn’t feel good to make mistakes.
With a few weeks of distance, I am actually pretty pumped about these mistakes. Mistakes are the quickest way to learn something new and these learnings are invaluable to me. They will inform all the decisions I will make as an entrepreneur down the line.
Will I repeat some of the mistakes? Most likely. Is this bad? No, it is part of the process. Contexts change, markets change, people change: What didn’t work in one situation might work marvelously in a different one.
I am eager to continue working on knugget and find a way to make it a success. It has been so much fun already and I can only imagine how thrilling it’s got to be if you build something people enjoy using and where you can maintain your livelihood off of.
I don’t fail because I keep doing things until they work. — Fynn Kliemann
Having said that, it is not sustainable for me to work full-time on knugget anymore as my governmental funding ran out last month. To pay the billz I will freelance and potentially work on a different project which generates revenue much sooner. I haven’t fully made up my mind yet and want to maintain the freedom to jump on opportunities when they arise.
So far, being an entrepreneur has been lots of fun! I met so many cool and capable people and learned so much that I can’t wait to see what the next couple of months will bring :)
Thanks for taking the time to read this!
If any of this resonated and you’d like to get in touch you’ll find me on Twitter.
