Learn to Change & Don’t Program Everything Yet
14 Aug 2013
I came across a really good startup article on my Twitter feed today and I thought I’d share it with you’ll — From a Mailchimp email and Wufoo form to $25k in 3 months.
While we are currently growing Brightpod, I like reading articles (mostly experience pieces) on how other startups have ramped up growth. It is like asking yourself — “are you doing enough?”.
A few points this post makes caught my attention and are almost like golden rules to follow when building a product:
1. Don’t be afraid to change.
Although we had over 15,000 app developers signed on, what we were building wasn’t the solution to the real problem in app discovery.
After the meeting, my co-founders and I sat in our office thinking, “so what the hell do we do next? Do we keep going down a rabbit hole knowing that there probably won’t be a light at the end of the tunnel?”
We ended up spending the next week re-thinking everything we thought was true, resulting in one of the most stressful times in our company’s life.
After peeling back the layers of our company, we realized that no amount of marketing can save a poorly constructed app.
To solve this, we needed to find a way to help people create better quality mobile products, increasing their chances for success.
Teams should spend time thinking about what they are doing, what is working and what is not. If something is not working then switch gears and try something new, There is nothing wrong with that. Out here in India, I always see people resistance to change. The thought goes “oh, we have spent so much time doing this, how can we let it go and do something else”.
Focus on what is working and the results. Less on what you have done.
2. Start manually. Don’t wait to program everything.
Everything behind the scenes was still mostly manual, but we started to replace the most pressing issues with technology.
Developer-run startups have this urge to automate and program everything and only when everything is finished then release it to the world. A few people I spoke to last week had a good product but had not even started marketing it. Why? Because they were still putting the finishing touches to the app. What a bummer!
Sometimes when you think up an idea you immediately picture a vision of what the final product will look like — there’s going to be a wall, chat, portfolios, and more.
This can sometimes paralyze you from starting because the task seems so daunting, you begin to think that you’ll need to hire more people or raise funding to get this done.
Instead, my advice is to start. Don’t wait for everything to be perfectly figured out. If you start, you’re already 90 percent ahead of the game and you’d be surprised how far you can get.