If you go through my products list, you’ll realise that none of those were successful, I was lucky that one got acquired.
All the other tries failed. What could be the reason?
Let me tell you about me first. I started out with coding because I wanted a job, I’m a developer first, I think from a developer’s perspective. Only thing I was thinking about while building those products was about how to build(develop) them.
Most of the developers do think this way.
Building a product is just the first step. You also have to do marketing, reach out to potential customers. You need to understand how people think, write a better copy on your landing pages to have good conversion rates, for this you need to know writing. You should have good user interface for a better user experience, so you gotta know designing.
Building a product, “tech product” requires these four basic skills - designing, developing, writing, marketing. Also sometimes you may have to know a little bit about how to run operations and handle finances too!
Products are built by generalists and scaled by specialists
Someone said it, I don’t remember who was it.
There’s a whole separate debate about being generalist or specialist, both have their own valid statements, let’s just leave it there.
Now let’s get where we started. What could be the reason?
I was only good at building a product, not even that good, but the only thing that you may call me being good at. I knew nothing about marketing or writing, maybe a little bit enough about designing. If I had to make ailetter.tech - an ai tools directory work, I should have focused on learning SEO, constructing funnels, getting more backlinks and writing content around keywords, doing research on moz, aherfs, etc…
We can also say that the other reason could be copying what others are building.
But, I don't think that’s the reason to fail building a successful product. Copying? No!
Sometimes, I copied in my school exams and got good marks! That works!
That works because I copied the whole answer and for the respectively correct question, I even got more marks than the person I copied from! Why? My handwriting was better and I had more correct questions answered!
But you and I both know implementing this analogy in the product building concept isn’t that easy as fooling an invigilator/proctor and I won’t explain.
I still don’t know anything about getting customers, I still have no practical experience, just reading blogs and watching youtube videos on those topics won’t help! That’s just theoretical learning.
I’m planning on launching another directory and focus on learning growth and SEO, maybe also have a little bit of practical experience of doing influential marketing.
I also have a dev job you know!