How I wasted 3 years of my life on a SaaS app people didn't want
In 2019 I quit my comfy corporate job build an app to find healthy food whilst you're on the go. The idea was simple - A list of healthy food choices around you, wherever you are in the world. Think Deliveroo or Uber Eats but with only healthy choices.
We spent the first 24 months building the app in stealth. We raised investment off of an MVP (which we didn't release and only showed investors). We raised at a valuation of approx $1 million. I know this is small compared to most apps but to us this was huge. We celebrated like crazy then immediately got building our dream app.
The issue was it was our dream app. Not our (future) users. We built completely in stealth not showing a single user. Cut to one year later and we finally release the app. We have a launch party with champagne, branded cakes, you name it.
Our revenue that release day? $0.
Our revenue that week? $0.00
The issue? We had built an app that no one wanted apart from us. We wanted to be able to eat healthy food on the go to fit around our lifestyle, but what we found is that our customers wanted more structure and routine to their diets.
Here's how you can avoid making the same mistake:
- Start a mini community of users from day 1 and let them shape the product (I use WhatsApp)
- Become obsessed with finding customer pain points (I use Problem Perception)
- Have analytics everywhere in the app to monitor which features are useless (I use firebase analytics)
- Release fast and release early, then track crashes/bugs (I use Sentry)
Hope this helps 🙏
