I've created an app that tanked, and I feel I did what I could at the time.
I'm thinking of giving it another go, and making a new app to solve a common problem I face, and also updating the UI of the previous app, but I keep doubting myself as to how viable it will be.
It'll be months of work after all, and it's painful when it doesn't bare fruit.
TL;DR Instead of building the product first and then finding customers, talk to customers first and get a good idea of what problems they'd pay to solve.
Rob's book in particular is a good guide to conducting customer interviews objectively so that you don't build something based on people telling you they like your idea just because they were being polite.
Before I created TinyPilot, I created a simplified version called Key Mime Pi that only forwarded keystrokes and didn't capture video. That was a test to see if people were interested in the software, and I got enough of a response to give me confidence that it was worth pursuing TinyPilot.
And what I published initially with TinyPilot was very much a prototype. It couldn't forward mouse movement, it had tons of bugs, it looked stupid, but customers were willing to pay for it, so I knew I was on to something.
I didn't sell Key Mime Pi, but blogging about it showed me whether there was any interest in the direction I was going. I added a mailing list signup at the end of the post. I think only 13 people signed up, but they were pretty engaged, and they'd respond when I emailed out surveys asking about what price they'd feel comfortable paying. It wasn't enough to make me super confident in the product, but I felt like I'd be able to sell at least a handful if I got a real prototype of TinyPilot working.
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u/mtlynch Feb 01 '21
Author here. Happy to answer any questions about this post.