This early stage app developer wished he knew this one thing that would have saved him months of time

Noah Kim's shares his app development experience in our interview after just having launched in the app store:

When building a social networking app, we made the classic mistake of adding too many features to the MVP—things like reply-to-comments, mentions, and more. In hindsight, all we really needed was a basic, functional version of our core idea.

By focusing on bells and whistles too early, Noah delayed his launch by at least three months and overcomplicated our codebase. Looking back, I wish we’d started simpler and let user feedback guide us in making incremental improvements.

#mvp #startuplessons #appdevelopmenttips

Dustin Falgout just quit his job to focus solely on his entrepreneurial journey building apps. I am so inspired by his no holds barred attitude!

He worked two full time jobs to build up a little cushion - he has a family to support after all. But after discussions with his wife he decided to take a leap of faith to build a company full time.

I would love to hear from the community about how they got started in business

#entrepreneurship #startup #courage

Entrepreneurs: fear of failure keeps many people with great business concepts from trying in the first place. Here's why failure is actually good for you.

It teaches us one of two things:

(1) failing isn't so bad. You learn from your mistakes, brush yourself off and try again

(2) you learn that a traditional job isn't so bad and go back to that - let someone else take the risks.

Either way you will benefit from it. Failure is a great form of education and there is no shame in it. It's practically a rite of passage for people building startups.

I don't think others judge us for trying. I think it's our own ego that gets in the way. Wouldn't it be a shame if that was the only thing holding us back?

I’ve just released a series of short, easy-to-digest video clips that cover the essential steps for researching and validating your app business idea. These are aimed at supporting entrepreneurs like Dustin Falgout. From understanding your target audience to evaluating pain points, these videos provide a high-level roadmap to help you get started.

If you’ve got an app idea and want to bring it to life, I’d love to help. With 15 years of experience working on early-stage projects, I support founders in taking their business concepts to market

DM me for details

Coding and launching your MVP is just the beginning - there is so much work ahead

Noah Kim shares a common, yet surprising challenge many founders face: the sheer volume of work that comes after launching. While coding and debugging initially filled his days, launching Muffin brought a new reality—recruiting, fundraising, marketing, and of course, continuing to code. “I thought I was busy before, but now I wish my days were longer,” Noah reflects, highlighting the full spectrum of responsibilities startup founders often don’t anticipate.

#startup #founder #entrepreneurjourney

Unpopular opinion: you don't have to be a millionaire to be "successful" in business

I've worked for a few investor-funded startups and where the company is making a big bet. It's exciting. You work hard. Often sacrificing your free time and time with friends and family when working nights and weekends. You bought in and are swinging for the fences.

However, if you are not careful this can lead to burn out. This happened to me and it can take months to recuperate.

The hard truth is that 90% of these businesses will fail

An alternative to the "go big or go home" mentality is building a lifestyle business.

You make time for friends and family. You gain the freedom that working for yourself provides. You make your own schedule. You want to take a month off an travel to Peru? Do it!

I love Dustin Falgout's way of thinking on this. Take care of family, build the business and focus on self-improvement.

hashtag#entrepreneurship hashtag#lifestylebusiness hashtag#startup

SaaS founders, did you know that 30-40% of startups fail due to not achieving a product-market fit? To avoid this, consider conducting regular interviews with the sole goal of learning.

Here are six recommendations for getting the most out of interviews:

Do not go into the interview without a plan. You should have a list of open ended questions prepared ahead of time. Listen for pain points. Dig in and get specific with interviewees. Ask consistent questions across interviews so you can compare results.

Keep an open mind, do not lead people down the path to your solution. The point is to discover where prospective users are struggling. Read up on confirmation bias, so you can minimize its impact.

Focus on being present during the call rather than taking lengthy notes. I usually write down reminder notes that I want to ask about later on the call.

Use an AI note taker for transcripts, like Fireflies.ai. Then use ChatGPT to summarize pain points. I've found it useful to generate tabular results.

Read the "Mom Test"- it's got some great practical examples of how to get the most out of interviews

Review results with your product and engineering leads for consistent feedback. Take the time to distill what you learned as a group. Make a plan for what you want to put on the product backlog.

What strategies have you found effective in product discovery work? Share your insights!

As a freelance software developer, I assist clients in bringing new features and insights to market. Feel free to DM me or schedule time on my calendar.

Early stage startup founders building software often have a ton of great ideas, but it can be difficult to know what to build next.

In this video, I walk through a simple exercise that I do with my clients, that helps to prioritize a list of new features. My theory is that you'll want to prioritize the features that have the largest impact that are the easiest to implement. However, it's not always clear how much technical effort a new feature will take. We do not have to be precise here. Think t shirt sizes small, medium, or large.

The exercise includes adding some silly features for a hypothetical real estate web application. We estimate the values for business (or user) impact and the difficulty of implementation. We combine both the business impact and the ease of implementation into a single metric that can be used to order the features in our list. That way we can determine what has the biggest value with the least amount of effort.

Feel like you don't belong? Impostor syndrome is more common than you think— even the most successful business leaders face it. Here are 4 tips to overcome it.

When asked about impostor syndrome, many of us can relate. The feeling often shows up as self-doubt, comparison and the fear that everyone else “belongs” more than we do. Noah Kim and I chatted about this in a recent interview.

Yet, here’s what really matters: you are 𝐧𝐨𝐭 alone. Nearly everyone faces this at some point, and recognizing it as a shared experience is the first step to overcoming it.

Tips to Tackle Impostor Syndrome:

🤔 Reflect on your achievements, skills and positive feedback. Keep a list of wins—big and small.

💬 Find someone you trust in the community and talk it out. You’ll often realize others feel the same way, which helps put things in perspective.

📈 Focus on the progress you’re making. Remember it's progress not perfection. Embrace the learning curve and let go of needing to “have it all together”

🤝 Think of what you can do for the other entrepreneurs in the community. Sharing your experience, strength and hope can uniquely help someone else that is struggling.

#impostorsyndrome #entrepreneurship #growthmindset

Sick of the corporate grind? Go be a rascal! Pursuing entrepreneurship can be one of the most exhilarating professional challenges in life

🎥 I’ve just released a series of short, easy-to-digest video clips that cover the essential steps for researching and validating your app business idea. These are aimed at supporting entrepreneurs like Dustin Falgout. From understanding your target audience to evaluating pain points, these videos provide a high-level roadmap to help you get started.

💡 If you’ve got an app idea and want to bring it to life, I’d love to help. With 15 years of experience working on early-stage projects (coding for 30 years), I support founders in taking their business concepts to market

📩 DM me for details

For non-technical founders: it does not matter which programming language you use to get your MVP out the door. Do not get hung up on the intricacies of choosing one language or library over another.

(this may be an unpopular opinion in some circles)

The worst thing that can happen when working on a new project is that nobody will care about your business concept. I've been in this situation; it's terrible. All the sales and marketing in the world do not matter if you do not have a good product-market fit.

Optimize for the rate you can deploy new features. Getting users to engage and getting feedback is the name of the game! It is much more important that you are learning and adapting quickly.

Your code may be ugly, slow or a little clunky, but that's okay. If you are not a little embarrassed about your MVP, you are probably moving a little too slow. As my colleague said the other day, "do not over polish cannonballs".

One thing that is essential to watch out for if you are handling sensitive data (names, emails, phone numbers, social security numbers, credit cards, etc), is to make sure that you implement encryption, authentication and authorization properly. If this is something that seems a little daunting, there are experts out there that can help you out.

"The people are the product" - great leadership is about checking your ego at the door and supporting your employees.

My transition into leadership roles was not smooth; I was terrible in the beginning. I found that being in management wore down a lot of my sharp edges over the years. Moving from a software engineer (or I imagine any individual contributor role) to a manager often requires a completely different skillset.

Based on my own observations (anecdotal evidence), good engineers often do not make good managers. I feel that it requires developing a level of empathy for others and EQ that is not always present with people that have high IQs.

In recent years to better arm my engineering teams is share the vision of what we are trying to build, give them resources and the freedom to do the job the way they see fit. They have to be comfortable knowing it's safe for them to make mistakes.

It can be very tempting to go back and tell someone what to do when you see a better way. Instead consider how best to coach your team, so they can discover a better path on their own. When we do a good job, they will come up with a better approach than the one you were thinking of!

Don't waste time building products people don't need!

When talking to new prospective clients, I want to make sure that the project is successful. That means building something that solves a real problem. On almost every initial call, I ask the following questions:

- Who is the target audience for this project? - What problem are we solving for them? - How have you validated both the problem and solution with the target audience?

Much of this should be done *before* implementation begins. While your friends and family are a great support system and want you to succeed, you should go outside of this circle to validate your business concept with someone that will be objective and honest. While it may be uncomfortable to hear, critical feedback can be invaluable.

Sometimes we fall in love with our own ideas. This is a well known phenomenon called the IKEA effect (see https://lnkd.in/gW_BWexy). I think that letting go of the ego can help us to realize the best ideas, even if we are not the ones to come up with them.