I started my first software company 6 months ago. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

Six months ago, I co-founded my first software company, NewsCart. We make it easy to discover the most important news impacting your business.

My team and I have raised money from an angel investor, launched a product, and acquired pilot customers. We’re still early in the game, but these past six months have provided the most valuable learning experiences of my career. I hope to capture and reflect on these experiences as they come, refining and improving along the way.

This journey is special to me. I’m the first person in my family to start a business, let alone a software company. Hopefully my reflections will be helpful to other underrepresented founders like me who are eager to acquire an equity stake in the world, and ready to get started.

That said, here are a few of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in the early stages of NewsCart.

You don’t need money to get started

This is a horrible misconception that I once believed. In reality, my team conducted customer interviews, acquired pilot customers, and built a functioning prototype (with Sketch and Invision) for less than $100. We didn’t need investors or wealthy parents to make early progress.

Finding a technical co-founder requires transparency

Non-technical folks like me need a technical partner. I found mine by talking about my idea to anyone that would listen, not by concealing it like a CIA operation. To be honest, most people won’t care about your idea, but eventually, you may find someone interested in building it with you.

The faster you launch a product, the better

Research is valuable, but we spent too much time doing it. We didn’t begin to learn what customers actually wanted until we built a minimum viable product (MVP) and let customers use it. People give better feedback about tangible products than imaginary products.

It’s OK for your MVP to be bare bones

I’m confident our MVP was imperfect, but we believed it should be bare bones to avoid exhausting resources on unnecessary features. The important thing was that it was good enough to solve the customer’s problem. From there, customers were able to provide valuable feedback to guide our product roadmap.

You don’t create your product roadmap, customers do

You need to build something people want. Many of the assumptions I made about what potential customers wanted were flawed. I realized the more effective approach is to talk to them and develop hypotheses about what they want, then test those hypotheses within a live environment.

Keep it simple when describing your product

People need to understand what you’re building. We initially described NewsCart as “A cloud-based platform that helps you discover and share news with your employees and customers” and people were confused. Things got better when we described it as “An easy way to discover the most important news impacting your business.”

Customers don’t give a damn about anything that isn’t relevant to them

Don’t waste time pitching customers every little feature of your product. Learn their problems and tell them exactly how your product will solve them. Get to the point, quickly.

Media attention is more valuable when you’re ready to scale

It feels good to be praised, but social shares don’t generate revenue. We received attention for winning a pitch competition at SXSW. It generated some great leads, but we couldn’t capitalize on them because we didn’t have a product yet. Media attention will be far more impactful when we’re more prepared to reap its benefits.

Expect to be stressed the hell out

Expect to be stressed about money. Expect to be stressed about product deadlines. Expect to be stressed about buggy features. Expect to be stressed about acquiring customers. I’m learning how to celebrate small wins so that stress is manageable and doesn’t impede our team’s progress.

If my journey as a tech founder were a book, this would be chapter one. I look forward to sharing my experiences — good and bad — as my team and I venture into our next six months together.

Is there anything you would change or add to this list? I’d love to hear from all types of entrepreneurs and investors. We love advice.

James