Uncloud: A retrospective
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When went well
- browser parrot
- scratched our own itch and gave us an initial product to use to grab attention
- Show HN was successful, 150 downloads
- while HN success is unpredictable and likely un-repeatable, this was still a win and something we didn’t do (!) for pairwise.
- Discord link on the website was key to start community building
- Discord > Slack unless your market is already all over slack
- uncloud page directed to our existing discord
- featured a form in order to get the download
- ask your beta users for info. that’s the price of admission
Meh
- user testing (via usertesting.com, i think)
- we did not find a way to make these insights actionable
- we were not systematic (should have prob read the mom test first)
Didn’t go well
- we could have done so much more on the marketing front
- we never made use of the emails collected from our beta signup form
- founder disagreement was increasing as these efforts were paying off, thus we didn’t take advantage
- cofounder fit
- nik didn’t want to do venture backed. this could have been sussed out MUCH earlier
- lack of ‘trust’
- not in the sense of cofounder is going to intentionally harm the company, but…
- in the sense that I didn’t trust Nik’s product thinking. maybe trust isn’t the right word. I thought the decisions he made around product were not good, and thus wanted full decision making for myself. however, that would alienate nik and ruin his productivity + motivation
- by ‘trust’ i mean whatever is necesary for a disagree and commit strategy to work. if we disagreed i didnt’ want to commit to his ideas and he didn’t want to commit to mine