Conclusion
I've decided to close the chapter on this part of my journey, and this piece is a documentation of my learnings.
About
Sheltah was intended to be a real estate platform that provided users with a great experience wherever they were in their journey. Some of the core features included:
- Granular search - users could sort and filter listings by price, number of bathrooms, parish, postal zone, etc.
- Tools and resources - like mortgage calculators and educational blog posts.
- Analytics - to help realtors better understand their followers and the performance of their listings.
What I got wrong
- Having a weak value proposition. The product was good, but not 10X better than current alternatives. It was simply not a big enough pull for users or for myself.
- Not starting small. The overhead of setting up and maintaining native apps in both app stores was not the best use of time, especially in the early days. It would have been more efficient to start with a website, which would have allowed me to iterate and pivot faster.
- Premature optimization. Setting sail on the perfect ship doesn't matter if you're heading in the wrong direction. As a recovering perfectionist, it was really hard to ship something that had bugs or wasn't pixel perfect. I should have focused on achieving the elusive PMF (Product-Market Fit) before dedicating time to ironing out wrinkles.
- Not giving marketing the respect it deserves. We all dream of building the "product that sells itself", but even those require a lil good ol' marketing.
What I gained
- Breadth. Working on Sheltah just made me better across the entire stack, because I had to do everything myself. Design, engineering, marketing, you name it.
- Courage. In the earliest days, I had to go for a walk before deploying the apps, just to ease my nerves. Lord have mercy, lol. Over time, that fear of failing on the big stage faded.
- Perspective. Engineering is difficult in its own right, but product and entrepreneurship are different beasts entirely.
I took a risk, and it didn't work out. I learned a lot though. Onwards.
The Sheltah Stack (for the techies)
| Category | Tools |
|---|---|
| Project Management | Notion |
| Design | Figma, Excalidraw |
| Front-end | Expo (React Native), Next.js |
| Back-end | Express, Node.js, Postman |
| CI/CD | GitHub Actions |
| Hosting | Heroku, Netlify, AWS |
| Database | Postgres |
| Analytics | Sentry, Google Analytics |
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