13 Product Lessons

After building a good number of products, i’ve come across some patterns I hope you may find helpful if you are still in your idea stage or are in the middle of building your product.

• Manage your expectations
• It’s best to stick with a field you know really well. A field that very few know better than you.
• Niche products are easier to build and launch.
• Don’t start building anything until you have a few paying customers lined up.
• Set a soft or hard launch deadline from day one. Otherwise you may never launch.
• Stop adding a bunch of unnecessary features no one asked for.
• Focus on doing 1–3 features well instead of doing 100 mediocre features.
• Focus again and again on the problem you are trying to solve.
• Pay attention to the tiny unnoticeable details that make your main 1–3 features amazing.
• Make your UI simple enough for a 5 year old to navigate.
• Build in super thorough analytics so you can learn from user behaviors.
• Test the heck out of your product before launching.
• Launching is a long journey and often an uphill battle. There are going to be some great days and some not so great days. Learn to pace yourself and keep giving it everything you have…