(1/3) — 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 130 DAUs — slowly but steadily decreasing… So, things don’t go particularly well. Here is what I learned (Part 1 of 3).
What’s knugget? knugget (“nugget”) is a network to discover knowledge nuggets with a built-in spaced repetition feature. We aim to enable people to retain their key insights so they can apply them in their lives. It’s the first time I build a tech-product and I made allllll the mistakes: I’ll share with you the 19 things I learned so far — in three parts, so bear with me.
While sharing my learnings, I will provide some context. I hope this increases the likelihood of others finding themselves in the description. I find advice within context more valuable because it reduces the room for misinterpretation.
More importantly, when I read (and ignored) generalized advice, I used to think: “Well yes, that makes sense, but it doesn’t apply to me in this situation because BLA-overconfidence meets lack of experience-BLA”. Now I know that the likelihood that my hunch is wrong is significantly higher than that the person sharing learnings from a real experience is wrong.
I hope to prevent some of you from making this meta-mistake by expanding on the context. So let’s do this!
The learnings broadly fall in three categories: Entrepreneurial Skills (⚙️), Product Management (💻), and Decision-Making (🧠). In this first part I’ll share my learnings regarding product-agnostic Entrepreneurial Skills(⚙️).
🛑⚙️ Mistake 1: I started building right away
Many of the following mistakes are rooted in impatience: I wanted to start building as soon as possible. So I did — big mistake!
I recently heard this quote in a podcast, which sums it up perfectly:
If you don’t have the time to do solid research at the beginning, I sure hope you have time to change everything later on.
🟢⚙️ Learning 1: Be patient. The time you invest in solid research, thinking and planning pays back manifold down the line.
🛑⚙️ Mistake 2: I built for “people who forget things”
I did not understand the importance of market segmentation. Theoretically, I got it: developing a customer persona, finding a small group of people who have a pressing problem etc. but in my day-to-day work that wasn’t reflected. I did not put together a detailed customer profile and therefore failed to strictly search or filter for people who match that profile. I invited everyone to test knugget and give feedback — the more the merrier.
I had a broad idea to build knugget for people who are interested in Self-Development and bother that they forget so much from the books they read. This is way, way, way too broad and undifferentiated to gather deep, precise user insight, identify a pressing problem and build a compelling solution for that.
The not-so-targeted targeting led to the perfect confusion: I ended up with lots of contradictory feedback which made it really difficult to make informed product decisions.
More importantly, it set the whole endeavour up for failure, as we will see soon.
🟢⚙️ Learning 2: It’s really important to know exactly who I build for. The profile should be ridiculously specific at first and adjust as I gather more information.
🛑⚙️ Mistake 3: I didn’t deeply explore the problem nor defined the problem context precisely.
The initial problem description was something like this: “We forget insights from non-fiction books before we can apply them. This makes reading ineffective and inefficient.”
My reasoning was simple: If you want to apply an insight, you have to retain it. Many studies prove that spaced repetition is one of the best ways to increase knowledge retention — let’s apply it to insights from books!
This oversimplification led to an unspecific value proposition which led to a product which doesnt solve anyone’s problem. But I’m jumping ahead.
What I should have done is narrowing down the problem and problem context significantly, looking like this:
Segmenting the market beforehand is a great starting point. A few simple questions to start with are:
- Who has this problem? (your segment)
- When does it occur?
- Where does it occur?
- How does it effect the person?
- How does it make them feel?
With the context at hand, I could go deeper on the problem. Asking “Why?” several times and exploring each of the layers with surrounding questions can lead to many new insights and entry points for further research.
Organizing them in a problem tree can help:
The process of finding the right segment to build a solution for while defining the problem context is iterative. During the research, more and more insights clear up the understanding of who has which problem.
🟢⚙️Lesson 3: Examine the problem and problem context. Keep refining the segment I want to solve this problem for.
🛑⚙️ Mistake 4: Running with an unspecific value proposition.
I couldn’t formulate a precise and specific value proposition because I had the impression that I would leave things out — this is a red flag 🚩
“keep things in mind” is the not a very precise value proposition, to put it mildly.
This vague value prop left people testing out knugget confused and made it very difficult to streamline the product itself. There are many different use cases knugget caters to broadly but not a single one knugget caters to precisely.
Had we built a specific solution for a pressing problem of a small group of people, we could’ve iterated closer to a compelling solution instead of shipping somewhat random features a small subset of our current users requested. A solid product-solution fit would’ve increased the chances significantly of acquiring paying customers.
🟢⚙️Lesson 4: If I can’t put my value proposition in a few words, check my segmentation and problem research.
🛑⚙️ Mistake 5: I didn’t geek out on what’s already there.
Once you know exactly who you want to solve which problem for, it’s time to explore the solution space or do what I call “concept research”.
I conducted just a broad concept “research”. I spent a few hours googling, signed up for a few similar tools and played around with them for a bit before I thought: “This is too far away from what I envision. Don’t waste your time.”
I did not become a power user to experience the value these tools really provide (vs. what they promise) and to understand their weaknesses. Doing so would’ve provided deep insights into the challenges current users have and how these tools address them. I could’ve tried to reverse engineer the user insights the team behind the tool might have and how they responded to them.
Furthermore, I should’ve seeked advice from experts in the field. It took Andy Matuschak three messages on Twitter (thanks for replying🙏) to question the underlying hypothesis knugget was built on: Resurfacing insights helps us retain them better. It doesn’t.
Back then I had never used Twitter and didn’t know how responsive many people are. But I’d probably had thought that “it’s different in my case” anyways — remarkable how humbling failing is.
🟢⚙️Lesson 5: Take at least a full day per main competitor to dive deep into the tool, use it to its full potential, read comments from users, stalk founders on Twitter, in Podcasts etc. Collect all of it in a comprehensive matrix to deeply understand the niche and where I can position my product. Oh, and ASK PEOPLE WHO KNOW STUFF — most are happy to help.
🛑⚙️ Mistake 6: Being a Digital Nomad made it difficult for me to stay emotionally engaged.
I spent the past months here and there, working on the go. It’s really hard to feel bad about the progress you are making with your startup, when you hike up a volcano or lay at the beach with a Mojito and friends.
Initially, I thought this is the perfect combination: Work your ass of during the week and explore the world on the weekends. I know that this works if someone else tells you what to do or you know exactly what you are doing. Being new to the game I think it is essential to stay tuned in to your startup, to keep thinking about how things go on the weekends and in the evenings and what you can do about it to make it work better.
Being out exploring over the weekends, I struggled to stay tuned in with knugget. On Mondays I found myself with a lot of motivation and self-induced pressure to GET SHIT DONE but I was lacking the reflection over the weekend to keep adjusting the direction we were running towards. A friend told me in March that direction beats speed and having run somewhere without really knowing where, I now get what he meant.
🟢⚙️Lesson 6: Stay at one place to have routines free up your cognitive capacity for your startup (at least until it is clear, what you are building and how you get there).
🛑⚙️ Mistake 7: Schedueling MUST DO tasks on weekends.
I scheduled a few tasks on the weekend, which were MUST DOs — and did some of them half-assed or not at all. Being my own boss, nothing really happened but it harmed the development of knugget in the long run and, if other people were involved, weakened my credibility.
Building a company is a marathon and for me it is important to prevent that it doesn’t fill up my life completely. During the winter days and with COVID, I worked through weekends a few times and could feel how much less productive and motivated I was in the following week.
For me it’s crucial to get at least one day free of any appointments to sleep in and do whatever I feel like doing. Sorry, no #hustleporn today.
🟢⚙️Lesson 7: Do what I gotta do on week days and keep the weekends free to do things I enjoy. Meet friends, run, learn something startup related, read, do a do-my-shit-day, work on other projects, get bored: Recharge.
🛑⚙️ Mistake 8: I didn’t regularly reflect on what I did.
It’s the last one for today but certainly one of the biggest mistakes I made. I started doing weekly reflections for a month at the beginning, but didnt make it a lasting habit.
The positive effect of reflections are twofold: The process of writing down what lingers around my brain clears my mind to make better decisions. But I only get half the value out of it, if I don’t take the time to do a meta-reflection regularly.
You’d be surprised how much of what you wrote down slipped your mind again, falling back into old thinking patterns. Only when you take the time to read through all of it and extract patterns and trends, you reap all the fruit and progress faster.
🟢⚙️Lesson 8: Do weekly, monthly and quarterly check-ins. Meta-reflect to lastingly learn from my own experience.
How about “Fail fast, reflect often” ?
I have built a little tool to help myself do these reflections regularly. It blocks my browser on Sundays until I wrote at least a few hundred words of reflection.
I played around to find the best set of questions and triggers for deep reflection of what happend in the last week, what could’ve gone better, etc.
And, most importantly, I want to have a seamless experience when doing meta-reflections. It was already super annoying jumping back and forth between four docs, trying to find the overarching themes and patterns.
I don’t want this shitty UX to stop me from getting the most out of quarterly and bi-yearly meta-reflections, so I started to design a seamless way to facilitate the monthly, quarterly and bi-yearly meta-reflections.
I think there is great potential to have GPT-3 assist us during the tedious work of reviewing and extracting patterns in meta-reflections — would love to talk to anyone who has played around with GPT-3!
Wanna test it? Please leave your mail here so I can reach out :)
In the upcoming part I will share with you all the mistakes I made as a first-time Product Manager — oh boi this is gonna be fun!
