Tarlen

Joined 11 years ago

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Member since

Mar 14

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I built https://resend.io/ over the past 9 months. Launched paid version a couple of weeks ago and it's looking good so far

Comment · 10 years ago

I charged when I had the first good feature, and that was about 1 months after the initial release

Comment · 10 years ago

I wish, more like some weird amalgamation of other websites blended together with my caffeine trips and sleep deprivation. I once heard good artists borrow, great artists steal

Comment · 10 years ago

Valid point, to avoid this trap I did a modest amount of initial market research and realized a lot of people were having problems with my competitor's offerings and were actively looking for alternative solutions.

I set out to test this as quickly as I could and just kept going at it when I verified they were willing to backup their frustrations with their creditcard.

Comment · 10 years ago

If I remember correctly, I pushed the barebones chat plugin out (it was embarrassingly bad at this point) after 1-2 months of development. At that point I was also working part-time and finishing my CS degree, so the amount of time I had to work on it was limited.

Somehow I still managed to convince a few people to use it though

Comment · 10 years ago

Definitely. You will reach a point where perhaps you will be spending 70% of your time building out novel features, while the remaining time is spent reiterating on your existing features to make sure they stay relevant.

And the beauty of being a solo founder (even more so a digital nomad living sparingly) is that you don't have to go head to head with the giants, even if you were to just tickle them with a stick and steal 0.1% of their customers, you'd be doing very well for yourself.

And since you cannot match their wallet, try to beat them in efficiency. With smart technology decisions, you can maintain incredibly low operational costs, while ensuring massive scalability (shout out to Elixir).

Comment · 10 years ago

If you can execute well and if the demand is there, that's definitely a viable strategy to get you off the ground - Ride the wave

Comment · 10 years ago

Shame on me for testing on an outdated FF version. Deploying fix now.

Comment · 10 years ago

I will agree with the strategy of separating your product into sub-products, and working on and releasing them one at a time. A single, well-executed feature is often better than many mediocre ones.

Especially as a solo founder (shameless plug: I run https://resend.io), I think this is the best way to both test your assumptions early, and to consistently ship improvements without spreading yourself too thin.

I've taken this approach as I set out to compete with companies with 100s of millions in funding and 100s of employees who had built out very feature rich and elaborate product platforms.

In my specific case, it went something like

1. build a shitty live chat plugin

2. make said shitty live chat plugin good

3. extend previously shitty live chat plugin with shitty automated messaging capabilities

4. make those shitty automated messaging capabilities good

5. and so on..

In between each step you should try and get people to use it, be shameless. You'll often be surprised that you can find users already at step 1, despite competitors already rocking well-established and mature solutions.

Doing this long enough (I have been going hard for 9 months), all of a sudden you'll find yourself with your own platform, built slowly by stacking one brick on top of another, and sticking to it.