>You mentioned that building tinypilot suddenly sparked way more interest than your other attempts. Do you have a plan for your next product? Try out different things and hope you find something that gains similar traction? Or do you have some sort of evaluation criteria for your ideas?
Yes, the market's reaction to TinyPilot will definitely impact how I evaluate future businesses in the early stages. That said, I don't want to overindex on this one experience, as I know other founders who found product-market fit more gradually.
But my experience with TinyPilot does support lessons I've been taught that you should launch early, potentially without even a working product ready. In previous projects, I'd gotten too excited about the engineering and convinced myself I needed it first, but TinyPilot was a really small amount of engineering before I started selling.
My other takeaway from TinyPilot was how much of a difference it makes to sell a product that's aligned with my blog audience. I'm not really an IT blogger, but a lot of my readers are IT people and enthusiasts, so my blog was a huge advantage in finding early customers. My other products were things that had nothing to do with my blog like parsing recipe ingredients or finding live comedy.
I don't have a strict plan for my next product, but I want to focus on things that I can test quickly and drop if I can't find paying customers within the first two or three months.
>You mentioned that building tinypilot suddenly sparked way more interest than your other attempts. Do you have a plan for your next product? Try out different things and hope you find something that gains similar traction? Or do you have some sort of evaluation criteria for your ideas?
Yes, the market's reaction to TinyPilot will definitely impact how I evaluate future businesses in the early stages. That said, I don't want to overindex on this one experience, as I know other founders who found product-market fit more gradually.
But my experience with TinyPilot does support lessons I've been taught that you should launch early, potentially without even a working product ready. In previous projects, I'd gotten too excited about the engineering and convinced myself I needed it first, but TinyPilot was a really small amount of engineering before I started selling.
My other takeaway from TinyPilot was how much of a difference it makes to sell a product that's aligned with my blog audience. I'm not really an IT blogger, but a lot of my readers are IT people and enthusiasts, so my blog was a huge advantage in finding early customers. My other products were things that had nothing to do with my blog like parsing recipe ingredients or finding live comedy.
I don't have a strict plan for my next product, but I want to focus on things that I can test quickly and drop if I can't find paying customers within the first two or three months.