| I eventually learned (the hard way) to start getting users from day 1. Before I start coding something, I start with paper and pen and find a user. I build (quickly, usually always hardcoded stuff) it and show to user. They like / dislike it, and I go back and I fix it. At the same time, I get more users (usually through meetup groups and making friends). People are flaky, they stop using my app eventually so I plan to make a steady stream of friends / users. Eventually I find someone who wants to help. We go out to get users together and share weekly what features are most requested. Now I have 8 developers. The people who interacts with the most users have the biggest say in what to work on next, whether it be refactoring, bug fix, or feature build. We started using post-its, but now we are using gitlab issues list and monthly milestones. I hope to continue this forever so I don't lose touch with what is good for the user. I don't care about data nor the people who create the data, I want to always interact and make friends with my users so I can always make vision driven decisions and not get manipulated by misrepresented data. A trick I've come up with is to "fake" the initial product. One time I put a loading time of 1 day to process some data, but I'm actually doing it manually when I got home. Eventually, to save my time, I write a script to automate my work away. |