Building products with users’ love
At times people ask entrepreneurs what keeps them going everyday? I’m sure one of the motivating factors for most of the entrepreneurs has been the love of your customers. Everyday they reach out to us personally via email, WhatsApp, feedback channels to say ‘Thank You’. As an early stage startup, words like these make you feel that you’re building something which creates value in the lives of your users.
Obviously, this is the result of habits which we have been following for the last 8 months. Being bootstrapped has helped us stay focused, value our time and deliver the right experiences to our users at regular intervals. As the famous quote goes “Spend 55 minutes in understanding the problem and 5 minutes to solve it”— that is exactly we have been doing since the beginning.
It can be very tempting to start with an idea and run with it — to ship it, cross your fingers it finds a home, and validate its useful after shipping. But more often than not, what happens in these scenarios is that you ship a great idea, but it doesn’t find an audience. Hence we invest a lot of time pre-development by following these habits regularly:
- reach out to users / make enough channels to reach out to you.
- listen and understand their behaviour and motivation.
- build better experiences and show it to few users before rolling 100%.
- repeat this cycle
It’s very hard to design a habit-forming product if you don’t fundamentally understand people. Building something which users love will be a lot easier if you are able to figure out how your product going to fit in their daily lives and make them feel empowered, better, smarter and confident. It’s not rocket science, just build people-first experiences.
Reach out to me at [email protected] or tag me on twitter.com/smondal1008 to share your views.