[ChuckMcM]

That was a painful read, sorry.

My advice for the author is to take a moment and look at the things they pay actual money for. Goods, services, Etc. And how they discriminate between vendors of those goods. (Why buy brand X when brand Y is cheaper, when you need a widget how do you find where to get one? How do you decide which one to get? Things like that.)

It is a big "ask" to ask people for money in exchange for access to or to use your app. When is the last time you bought an app for your phone? What put you over the edge into buying something? What things about that purchase made you feel better about buying it, and more importantly what things made you feel worse about buying it?

In none of the anecdotes presented, is there a discussion about how you played the role of being a customer for your own product. How did you feel about the "value" of the product given the price asked? How did the installation process go?

It can be hard to step out of your own context sometimes and that is where it can be helpful for a trusted friend, who will give you honest advice, can be the stand in for the customer and tell you the answers to these questions.

Lastly, in all three anecdotes the author is laser focused on money, money, money. All of their metrics around success or failure are based on money. The problem here is that money is the first derivative of customer satisfaction not the metric. Focus on delighting customers and they will happily hand over money.

[amzans]

As someone with a graveyard of failed projects and a few with moderate success, I agree with this advice.

I have a day job, and run my SaaS as a side-business, so maybe not the OP’s aspirations. However, I want to add one point:

> “...happy to be reminded that others have failed many more times before finally getting their overnight success.”

Don’t build optimizing for overnight success, that’s essentially a casino.

Waiting a few weeks to see what sticks and what doesn’t is way too short based my experience.

From PG’s essays:

“Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going.”

And while ideally you’d validate the product as quickly as possible, most businesses can take years to truly take off. Often involving many pivots along the way.

Maybe I misunderstood, but don’t make “overnight success” your north star.

[lelanthran]

> That was a painful read, sorry.

For me too, but for different reasons.

> I tried to drum up support in niche subreddits only to have people tell me it was basically useless that they wanted a desktop version, not a mobile app.

This is valuable feedback - why did author not take the advice and give the people what they said they wanted (a desktop app)?

I mean, this is literally the first thing you should know as a salesman - sell the people what they are asking for!

It gets worse. Here's what happened on the second attempt:

> It was a summary of the review and it was bad. I forget the exact wording but basically, it was like “This app does not work as intended 0 stars.” It hit like a crash dummy flying into a brick wall at a crash site test. I was furious, despondent, and sad. I tried everything to get in contact with the user, I sent maybe 4 follow-up emails begging for me to help him or her fix their problem and to remove their review.

His user engagement was partially to fix the product and partially to get the user to change their mind about the review. The feedback of "This app does not work as intended" seems extremely clear to me - the product does not what the advertising said it did.

But he learned this lesson, right? Apparently not. On the third attempt:

> Soon I started getting feedback on forums along the lines of “The product looks interesting but I don’t really want to sign up for it without seeing the product first.” Again this was a free product at the time and all the user had to do was click the Google or Facebook OAuth button to log in, or enter their email but they refused to do so.

Users apparently did not want to sign up with their main email or facebook account details. His response?

> at this time I would learn and do anything to get more users to my site, to the point where I was getting banned from multiple forums for posting after people told me to get lost for promoting content.

Three times in a row he ignored what his users were telling him; he's lucky he got as far as he did on third third attempt.

(BTW: What's with the stupid copy/paste prevention on that site? Copying still works if you hold down shift though, so yay for incompetent devs?)

[dbattaglia]

> That was a painful read, sorry.

Agreed. The article felt to me like a reaction to the common refrain that, in tech, you can either be a founder or you can be a wage slave, and the former is clearly better. The product itself is secondary; the only important decision is, do you go the route of passive income ("lifestyle business"), bootstrapped business or VC-backed startup. As someone squarely in the latter camp of boring corporate coder, it can be hard to muster up much empathy, which I realize is a bit ugly of me.

The part I did find interesting was their discussion towards the middle of their free browser extension, and how the joy of others using their creation was exhilarating, while at the same time the feeling of negative criticism can be crushing. As someone who got into professional coding first by uploading code-like creations (the Native Instruments Reaktor user library) and having the same experience, I can vouch that this is the best feeling I've experienced coding and building things, and the criticism can actually help you learn to deal with such things better. It was unfortunate to me that the article then went back into some of the uglier parts about chasing money, clicks and SEO.

[tnolet]

> ... money is the first derivative of customer satisfaction not the metric

This is a great sentiment. The product and problem need to come first. So besides being a business person, you need to be a product person too: design, copy, UX etc.

[daniellarusso]

I really think you cannot emphasize the last part enough - money, money, money.

Only focusing on money as a metric seems to be a lagging indicator.

What is the adage? You are what you measure, or, you cannot improve what you don’t measure.

Yes, server uptime and latency is important, but so is customer satisfaction and the metrics of the application.