3 Unusually Painful Mistakes on My Side Project Journey to 100K Users

Reaching the end of your intuition for your user base, without data you make a lot of mistakes on the product. You have to spend time with your customers.

Write about those lessons as you learn them. If at all possible, publish what you write. Even if it is published to an audience of no one, you will be able to point people back to it later.

In college, the author started his first startup, and it failed. Before launch, he didn't talk to customers, he fought with his cofounders a lot. He didn't know how to build working software or deal with tech debt. He read Eric Ries's Lean Startup after this experience and vowed to use it. Since the insurance CRM was geared toward tracking existing... See more

Lots of people talk about getting stuck in “tutorial hell” — watching endless courses and tutorials while being unable to actually apply what they learned. I was able to avoid this by jumping right into the app dev process — I’d code until I didn’t know what do and then search up a solution.