My friends and family always ask me “How’s your startup?” and my answer has been the same over the past few weeks: “Still building the product”. Since this answer is boring, I will try to describe in a more interesting way here.
21/04/2015
As the first update, it is a bit long to give some background. The idea is to record the moment so I can check how crazy I was in the past.
Quit my job for almost 2 weeks now, and since the start of this year I’ve been switching from working full-time, part-time and taking unpaid leave, just to work on this product.
My product is a hard one to design, it’s something different from what’s in the market so every decision I have to make is completely based on my experiences and biases, which are prone to mistakes.
Problems that bug me:
- Not sure if choosing nodejs/mongo was the best choice. It did take me out of my confort zone (python, php, laravel, mysql, pgsql) and has been painful sometimes, but so far I haven’t encounter anything I couldn’t do, so the light is still green.
- Interface design/UI - I’m not a designer but I can do things that doesn’t look too bad. The problem is that it takes me too much time to iterate over the design until I reach something I like. I wish I could just get it right at the first attempt.
- What to cut? - As a lean startup, the biggest challenge is to cut features otherwise it will never launch.
Things I’m happy with:
- The product is simple, hopefully it won’t need much time for our users to learn
- The product is slowly looking better. I think it’s important that people enjoy using it so UI is a bit priority for me.
- My wife’s support. Yes, that’s very important!
Funding
I did not get funded to build this product. It’s completely bootstrapped. My strategy was to invest my time to build the company and use savings to pay for my cost of living. This gives me a limited timeframe to “experiment”, but there are some routes I can take when the money start to run out.
