Hack N' Hustle - The Developer's Business Mantra
Four months into Gameplan's existence, things are slowly getting warm. We're getting to a place where Gameplan's product core is very stable, we've started getting meetings with customers and we're in the process of building payments so we can buy our volcano lair filled with wooden lion statuettes (and maybe even real lions).
As a developer who's had only moderate level of experience talking to customers and users, it's been exhilarating listening to how people react to Gameplan, thinking about ways to get them to use it effectively, improving the user interface so that it is more intuitive to first-time users and filtering user-feedback to weed out the nice-to-have ideas from the must-do-now ideas.
Build It and They'll Come Is Largely A Fallacy Many developers and designers, myself included, tend to think of products as works of art in a museum - it only needs to be awesome for people to flock to see (or use) it. While I am a firm believer that Internet companies need to be product-focused, we as developers tend not to see the flip-side of the coin. Engineering and design decisions need to be part of the feedback loop which involves users and customers. The less mainstream your user-base is (they don't know what RSS means, they just about understand Facebook and Twitter is a teenager's plaything for them), the more you have to be hustling to meet them, talk to them and understand their problems.
Hack N' Hustle Andy and I have learnt some valuable lessons from the last few months, some of them which we think is important for any startup (and more so, if you're scrappy bootstrappers).
Demo your product to as many people as you can face-to-face: The less they understand your domain, the better. We demoed a sports-management product to a room full of geeks at Echelon for a whole day, and immediately there were a bunch of weaknesses in our product which stood out like sore thumbs. After demoing to more family and friends who have very little interest in sport, we incorporated more improvements. As Andy mentioned a couple of days ago, we helped a local sports venue run a 16-team football tournament and we stumbled upon more ideas as to how to make Gameplan better. We're going to take this one step further in a couple of weeks and let one of our users setup his league from scratch while we observe him - and I'm sure this is going to yield even more learnings.
The Feedback Loop: Developers should be answering customer support emails, meeting users and customers and interacting with them. If you're a non-technical founder, take your lead developer to meet users and customers and encourage them to demo your product. Bugs and annoyances often don't get fixed because developers don't experience it often enough. From experience, my biggest motivation to fix a bug or an annoyance comes from when I am embarrassed by one during a live demo.
Demoing and getting feedback is only one part of the process. What completes the circuit, is deciding what to do with it. So far, Andy and I are in agreement over most issues which crop up, so we do not waste any time arguing the merits and faults of a particular idea. Ideas get filed as issues on GitHub, and we work on them as soon as we can.
Building in a Vacuum is Stupid: Once the core of your product is done, stop. And launch! Andy and I could have gone ahead and built more features into our product without really knowing if users want them or not. For example, we spent a couple of days building 'sponsors' and 'news stories' features, i.e. organisations (and clubs) can have sponsors as well as news stories (sort of like blog posts). What we realized from speaking to a couple of potential big customers was that these were premium features which would be needed only by the big customers - and the big customers were probably not going to be our first few customers anyway, so we really didn't need to build those features. Luckily we didn't spend too much time building these features and we took them out before launch, but it is an important trap not to fall into - don't go on a building spree!
Your product is only a tool which lets users become awesome, don't be engulfed by the product's awesomeness, however awesome it may be. So while you should hack your way to a great product, you should hustle your way to getting customers and users - and that is what makes a business successful.
Otherwise you don't have a business, you just have an art exhibit.
