This was my 5th startup. During my college days I kept launching startups (Kroomsa, Precimark, MyJugaad.in). Failure of all these made me introspect and I realized I was trapped into the engineer's fallacy: build things without knowing or caring about how to market them. This pushed me to learn marketing and I fell deeper into the rabbit hole.
So, my next attempt was build a marketing suite as I was learning a lot about what works and what doesn't. But even that turned out to be a dud as I put too many features into it. But I did launch it on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876141 and got a few users.
Users found the UX too complicated and I got feedback to focus on 1 among the 10s of features I had added. See this comment by @patio11
>because you pack an AWFUL lot onto that first screen
So as my next iteration, I picked A/B testing and made a visual editor to make creation of A/B tests stupidly simple and that took off because it allowed marketers launch A/B tests without being reliant on developers.
This product, Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), took off!
So, my next attempt was build a marketing suite as I was learning a lot about what works and what doesn't. But even that turned out to be a dud as I put too many features into it. But I did launch it on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876141 and got a few users.
Users found the UX too complicated and I got feedback to focus on 1 among the 10s of features I had added. See this comment by @patio11
>because you pack an AWFUL lot onto that first screen
So as my next iteration, I picked A/B testing and made a visual editor to make creation of A/B tests stupidly simple and that took off because it allowed marketers launch A/B tests without being reliant on developers.
This product, Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), took off!