Essays
I made a lot of mistakes (and did a lot of things right) with Bloon. In retrospect, I think I could have avoided a lot of the mistakes if I had a cofounder, someone who is spending just as much time thinking about the problem, to talk through the product and marketing decisions with.
Figuring out how to market your solution is just as integral a part of the product development process as finding the best solution.
First time use experience is just as important as the experience for existing users. Spend as much time, if not more, thinking about how to make the first time use experience great.
Because I started Bloon as a side project, I made the big mistakes of building the product before doing user studies.
The user funnel, the importance of user interaction design, and don't listen to every user equally.
Start out with a problem that you want to solve. With limited resources (money, time, talent), your team is in a race to find product-market fit that’s either profitable or has potential to be before you run out of resources.
I did a many things right. It may not seem like it from my other essays, but that’s because I’m especially hard on myself and want to make sure I learn from my mistakes. Here are a few things I did right.