Product That I could never Publish, Unveiling Lessons from my failed attempts✨

#product #productengineering #opensource #programming

Hello Beautiful People of the Internet, Welcome to my blog once again, Today I have got no series to be continued or any specific tech blog but this is one of the blog where I think people like me need to avoid this mistakes once they step into building a product which could be huge in the market and that targets the specific audience or niche category. So have a Cup of Coffee for all those who are reading before coding or grab a fruit who are already on a break reading this while coding, Here I unveil my mistakes while building a product from scratch.

Let's unveil the lessons without further ado!

Lesson One - Get a Better Product Market fit check :

While working on my first idea I took a lot of jab at people on validating my idea and this led me to not so great path and indeed that lead me to indirectly kill my product in five to six months, while it was in the development phase.

Idea Reveal :)

Any how the above will only justify when I tell you the complete story, In last Feb before I decided that I would pursue a full time job at SDE-1 position. I was thinking of building something from scratch right when I joined my University I was keen at building things got into multiple hackathon's, also the SIH'22 (Smart India Hackathon) which I made a decent positioning of Finalist making some great product for Problem Statement provided by Ministry Of Education. But this all never lasted long enough till I graduated from University, I wanted to build something huge which got some potential revolutionising the industry, For me it was my favourite one, the industry of anime and Manga though I was not an avid reader of Manga but I loved to read and binge watch some anime lately. Although it was not any streaming application. It was something related to people posting there cosplay and anime dressed photos and videos on our application which could help Manga Artist to get there anime character images in just a click and help themselves saving a lot of time and effort to draw some side characters of there recent manga and stuff though it could also help people make some random anime as well by using these characters, But underlying my social media application I thought of these AI/ML stuff and a market place idea which I thought with some friend of mine while getting use cases for this idea. I almost took some time after Feb which got me started developing it and all other check's done we started developing at the end of the Month of June. I thought to keep that stuff open-source for a while but not really later on.

But later on Coming on the Above Point I wrote Get a Better Product Market Check, I and my friend who was at same University whom I guess had some basics about Machine Learning while he was learning it, where in some search about the people who could validate our idea met some of the people who couldn't stop asking us what's the purpose of building things related to anime , I guess I heard hundreds of time the same thing that India doesn't have a market around it to support the same but I wasn't developing some stuff for money or instead we could say, I was in search, If I could make a product which could result us some yield by the market place model, but the stuff people took more seriously was the Business Model of the Application, While I thought of creating Algorithms and Own Models for the Anime Characters on the Underlying Principles of Stable Diffusion. But I I always thought all my products from the perspective of Engineering's mindset that this could be built and scaled like this rather than going hard on business side of it. Also Where I lived doesn't have a tech culture as India's Silicon valley So People Never Understood this part that experimenting a product is a stuff which could help people like me understand how does this dynamics work for a betterment of application.

Lesson Two - Get Good People With Who you built the product :

I had three or four university friends through out the four year programme from which I told two of them my idea to work on they agreed but not really as we decided to go ahead we remained (sorry cut the we) I remained (who could develop practically) two of the one was the above friend with whom I got my idea converted to some use-cases and the other one was similarly planning to do something huge for portfolio's same as me and the other lad, But with Zero Motivation and this all drained in few months remaining only with two people with one who was still learning. And hence I thought product building was tough when especially you only got the addiction of building big but you can't keep people motivated with no incentives / (pretty cool word) bucks.

Lesson Three - Friends With Job, Makes the Product Enemy:

While All this mess I already had a job which is still I am currently pursuing, but this was to only fuel some of the costs that could be paid for my side project as I recently graduated so I didn't wanted bigger bills to be paid by my parents hence I thought it was a great decision to go two timing building my product at night (two-three hours I mean) and doing a full time job together which absolutely make sense but for a bigger product and a good market fit for the MVP to work I don`t think the full time job was hand in hand it was the worst part ever cause you go full ham mode at you working place and boom you are exhausted also to make some changes I started working early in the morning a head start was always good this made it more easy for the five six months development in early phases of it.

Also The fact is I learn't a good freaking amount of stuff that no one could ever teach me and the bonanza was some dirty office politics :(

Lesson Four - Few People But Better People & Connections:

I always was kind of introvert and still I am but now when someone talks about tech I could open up easily, thanks to the corporate world, But No Connections to bigger organisation Engineers and founder, Few to no LinkedIn activities in a consistent manner and also city not that famous for tech I mean It is famous for Affordable development of Products from Scratch but ain't famous for Tech Revolutions, No one speaks tech, no conferences here or there, so building connections was near to impossible all that I had was university and old school friends and random hackathon members here and there,

Technically this could be under Lesson Three

But Meanwhile Under all this Mess I had got an opportunity to work at India's Silicon Valley, I almost had a dream for building a sustainable start-up many times right when I joined University, I thought I could handle the tech part and someone else could handle the Operations and other stuff related to business, I got a job but to build a proper product from scratch so I thought I could handle and get away from the mess creating something beautiful for my own product as well joining there and I started loosing attention on my current development plans and sprint's ( Till Now I was only the one who remained working on the product) But I always never loosed hoped on it at that very moment.
Also the Organisation that I was gonna join, where we almost completed our MVP for the product, in a month, backed off but yeah I started getting some good connection as the founder was one of the earliest member of Security at the Fastest growing Quick Commerce Brand (parent company rhymes with TOMATO), also I was not upset as that product was something that help me up-skill more helped me on how to manage product and also product engineering the stuff but yeah this was a important one to address this under this section as my Product where I was only working at that moment got almost killed after this.

Lesson Five - Keep Healthy Lifestyle

Remember last Feb as I said I had an option to join the organisation at the same City, where I completed my University Degree, After few days of my internship got completed, I got diagnosed with CNS-Syndrome due to b-12 deficiency which got me postponed that product to four or five months away which got me a late start but a good start for my software engineering journey in a real sense, Also I am more focused on health than before.

I didn't have anything to write more than this at this point While Contributing to my Second Product I am more focused to not follow this above points, but also this time I am not in a situation where too many cooks spoil the broth I am working by myself, No extra attention needed, also in the phase of MVP building this time I would prefer to product market fit after I complete MVP development (this is also an experiment) Ya, I do it a lot, My Life is now based on experiments😅

That's all Love you guys, Now After my React-Query Series I got around 6k+ Views on my blogs and meanwhile I was unaware about the numbers, hence when I checked that, I thought of writing a one to thank each of the 313 followers also to some I followed back on github.

If you got till here Get this blog a like and bookmark it to read it in future if you loved it share with someone who can avoid getting into this mess as I did

Looking Forward, I need to focus on my next product Bye:)