How to Recover After Seeing Your Start-Up Idea Get Beat
// written in 2020: tools, versions and prices may have changed since.
How to Recover After Seeing Your Start-Up Idea Get Beat
Intro
Hi, I may or may not have spent the last two months creating TraderNooks- An Animal Crossings New Horizons trading platform where users build a wishlist and can find others who have items on their wishlist with the click of a button.
Then, after finding users that owns their items they can select to make an offer. The offer is composed of what the user is offering to trade and their preferred means of contact.
It was a fun build.
However, another website beat it to launch and quickly dominated due to its brilliant UI/UX and fast time to market.
It launched two days before.
I was deflated. At seeing the other website go viral and become the defacto trading platform overnight for Animal Crossing New Horizons.
It wasn’t as bad since the idea itself was validated, albeit by another quicker dev.
Today, TraderNooks serves around 50+ users, a small number in comparison to Nookazons tens, if not hundreds of thousands of users.
So, I was a little frustrated. I had spent a lot of time and late nights into building something, only to see it be dwarfed. But, the most significant way to recover my drive, motivation, and headspace is to learn from what went well and what didn’t go well as a solo founder.
What went well
1.) I got lucky that it wasn’t a bad idea
2.) It obtained more users than any of my other projects without me doing any marketing
3.) I built the platform faster 1-2 weeks rather than 8 months
What didn’t go well
1.) Time to market that 1-2 days may have caused me thousands of users
2.) Inadequate mastery of UI/UX, TraderNooks has a ways to go
3.) Didn’t do any market research
Conclusion
After analyzing what didn’t go well and what did go well, I have decided to take a React Developer Course
I am currently about 75% of the way through and plan to use my learnings to refactor TraderNooks codebase.
Also, since I can’t always count on luck, especially since the cost of building a project is high as a solo founder with a full-time day job in DevOps. I have also decided to stop committing to building anything that will take longer than 3-5 days at most without doing market research and idea validation.