Lessons learnt from building Newslettrs

Building a product is great. It either produces something valuable or teaches you something valuable. I built newslettrs.app because I wanted a separate place to read my newsletters. While I am happy with how the app turned out, I am more happy about the lessons I learnt while building it.

I enjoy reading newsletters because of the clean reading experience. There are no pop-ups, no banners and none of the usability problems you see on websites these days. However, I wanted to have a separate place for them so my inbox remains uncluttered. I couldn’t find a product for my needs. Hence, I decided to build one. It took me 7 months to build it from concept to launch. I worked on it in my free time and I had a friend help me with some backend code. I launched on Product Hunt on Sept 14, 2019 and it was the #5 Product of the Day with 200+ upvotes. The launch week saw 400+ signups and currently, it has almost 600 users. (700+ as of Oct 2020)

One of the goals of building Newslettrs was to learn and it delivered. Following are the lessons learnt:

Product Lessons

  1. Involve users as early as possible. It helps build a product that users want to use. I began with a bunch of assumptions and built around it. Post launch, I discovered that my core assumption was totally different from how users used the product. I waited too long to involve the users.
  2. Keep the scope small and release often. It took me 7 months to release the first version. I should have cut the scope, released an MVP in 2 months and then iterated on it for the next 5 months. It would have been a significantly different product. It also shows the user that their feedback is valuable and that the product is getting better.
  3. Be great at what makes your product different. I focused a lot of my effort on the common things – registration, home page, etc and that did not give me time to focus on what made my product different. While all the above mentioned are important, the core of your product – what makes you different from others is even more important. Focus on that until you have a user base.
  4. Build a responsive web app first. This was one decision that turned out right. Building a web app makes your product available on all platforms. It also makes product deployment easier. My app did not need GPS, notifications or any of the other features that make a native app better, which made the choice a no-brainer.
  5. Have designs ready. Because I did not have the designs ready for what I wanted to build, I ended up changing the fonts, colors and layout so many times. I could have saved all that time if I wasn’t overconfident in my design + development ability at the same time. Changes in design are faster than in development which helps you get to the desired visual look and feel faster.
  6. Build for a specific audience. I read on Twitter that “If you are building for everyone, you are building for no one” and totally agree with it. Although I was building for myself, I wasn’t specific enough in my product decisions. Building for a specific set of target users would have made product better and the product decisions easier.

Other Lessons

  1. Doing accelerates learning. I learnt a lot more in 6 months by doing than during in 12 months of planning to do something.
  2. Launch across networks. I launched just on ProductHunt on a Friday evening. I think Monday/Tuesday launches work best on ProductHunt (based on the number of upvotes). Definitely consider other sites like IndieHackers, Index BetaList, HackerNews, etc.
  3. Work together. While working alone is not bad, working with other people is great. Your ideas get better when you discuss with them. Since you share workload, you can get more done in the same timeframe. Be sure to pick the right people to work with.
  4. There is always a solution on the Internet. You just need to know where to look. I had trouble authenticating automatically into cPanel and after days of going through the documentations and Google searches, I found the solution in a cPanel forum.

Though Newslettrs got 1000+ users in the first couple of months and had lots of daily users, I couldn't iterate on it as I got busy with my work. I enjoyed building Newslettrs and loved the lessons it taught me. I am sure it will make my future product choices better.