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by endymi0n 907 days ago
And honestly, pre product-market fit my advice would be not even coding, but iterating in an extremely scrappy way (read: Google Sheets, Jupyter Notebooks, no-/low code, handwritten invoices) until you have people paying for your product and not churning after the first month. Everything else comes secondary. For every company that didn‘t manage to scale their tech and teams fast enough, there‘s 100 that die by „building and they will come“ a polished app with great UX through 4 ecosystems that get launched to deafening silence.
3 comments
skrebbel 907 days ago
Tbf I believe this depends a lot on the product category. Uber could do this in their first few months but eg Retool couldn’t.
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macNchz 907 days ago
Obviously some ideas can’t be tested without writing some code, but it’s more of a mindset than a strict playbook–many programmers (myself included) tend to bias towards wanting to write code and avoid sales conversations until the thing feels “done”. Tech message boards are littered with programmers trying to justify why their app has to have a full polished build that will take a year before they can begin selling it.

When you get in the habit of asking yourself, before building, how you can learn the most about what people want with the least amount of code, clever ideas often come to mind.

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robertlagrant 907 days ago
Heh I was going to mention Google sheets. Great database that doesn't scale, but before you're close to worrying about that you have a lot of answers.
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fullstackchris 907 days ago
this is perfect advice which i can't agree with enough. that is unless the founders insist on a flawless UI... then you are in for a world of pain

never understood why teams of literally 1 or 2 devs are always forced to try attempt to acheive the visual quality of apps like instagram, whatsapp, etc

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liquidpele 907 days ago
> never understood why teams of literally 1 or 2 devs are always forced to try attempt to acheive the visual quality of apps like instagram, whatsapp, etc

For the same reason those kinds of places have more managers than workers… it’s a vanity project.

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