Building in public is hard. I'm starting something new and trying to get better at sharing the journey.

Learning to Build in Public


## Failing to Start a Software Business

I've been trying to start a software business for a while. I wrote about [how I quit my job and failed to start a business](https://ruminant.dev/blog/quitting-my-job-and-failing-to-start-a-business) a few weeks ago.

I spent seven months building a product. I should have been talking to people instead. "If I build this one feature, people will have to see how awesome this is," I would tell myself.

I would build that feature. Nothing would happen.

"Oh, now I need this other feature. That's what's missing."

I trapped myself thinking features were missing. A real customer problem was what was missing.

## The Love of Building

I was always tinkering with things growing up on my parents' farm. During heavy rain, I would play in the ditches along our dirt road, making dams with the rocks and mud. I helped repair farm equipment when it broke down. I took a welding class in high school and built a squat rack.

The ability to create software is magical. Software lets you build fast. You can turn an idea into real software and send it to someone on the other side of the world.

It's also easy to fall into the trap of building with your head in the sand when you love to make things.

After seven long months, I realized I had my head in the sand. I needed to take a complete break from [Polished](https://polished.app).

I had to start something new.

## Starting Fresh

Coming up with an idea wasn't a problem. I have tons of ideas that would be cool to build.

I struggle when it comes to validating an idea to determine if I should spend time on it.

I planned to spend a lot more time evaluating an idea this time before starting to build it. No matter what it was, I would start with a simple landing page and get feedback from people. I made a deal with myself that I had to have five email signups before I started building anything.

I was a paying user of [Shift](https://tryshift.com). Shift is an app that makes it easy to switch between multiple email accounts. It's a browser built on Electron that helps you separate browsing contexts.

Shift is trying to become the default browser. I liked the email switching feature, but I didn't want it to be my default browser.

It was also $99/year. That's a pretty steep price tag for an email switching app.

I decided to explore building a replacement. A chrome extension that allows you to switch between multiple email accounts.

I would start with a landing page.

## Iterating Before Coding

I spent an hour and built a rough design mockup of the idea I had. 

Then I spent a day building a landing page using the design mockups.

Creating the initial landing page was so much easier than usual with design mockups on hand. I was able to include screenshots of the product. I didn't have to resort to using generic illustrations.

Then I set out to get feedback. I was giddy with excitement to get this new idea out there.

This first version was horrible. 

Someone made a video review of my landing page. It was the most helpful review I've ever gotten on any work. The suggestions were great, but they weren't what blew me away. 

This video review made me realize that I had many ideas in my head that random visitors did not.

Strangers have no idea what your product is. When a stranger looks at your crappy landing page, they have a ton of questions. When you look at your crappy landing page, the answers are already in your head. You don't realize what's missing.

Seeing someone confused by my landing page was the shock I needed.

I wanted to share this realization with other people. I offered free landing page reviews for people in the form of a video.

I made over seventy videos after posting the offer on [Indiehackers](https://www.indiehackers.com/post/post-your-landing-page-and-i-will-give-feedback-in-the-form-of-a-video-2c3c01fd77) and [ProductHunt](https://www.producthunt.com/makers/1-makers/discussion/52307-giving-away-free-landing-page-feedback-videos#comment-1092519). I ended up making a few connections with people who offered to reciprocate.

I used these connections as a springboard to get feedback and iterate.

I would update the landing page and design mockups. The get feedback. I repeated this process until people seemed to understand the idea.

Once visitors started to understand the idea, I began to get signups. Five people signed up for early access in this first week of iterating on the concept.

## Time to Build

People that I didn't know were signing up. They would stumble upon the landing page for [Tidy Workspace](https://tidyworkspace.com) and signup without talking to me.

I had hit the limit of my design skills to make the mockups convey how it worked.

I decided it was time to build.

I went heads down built the initial version in a week.

## Failing to Share

I went dark.

I became so consumed by writing code during that week. My online presence went from the most active it's ever been to radio silence.

Traffic from the previous blog post and the weekend of landing page reviews was dying down. I was getting fewer messages from people. It felt like my existence was disappearing.

## Bright Future

Building in public is hard.

Being active online while building things is does not come naturally to me.

It's not a good feeling when traffic starts to die down. No matter what you build, it feels like people don't care about it. In reality, people don't know about it.

I'm excited that it took me three weeks to learn this lesson as opposed to seven months.

It's okay to build things slowly. It's okay to take longer than a week to create the first version of something.

Be consistent. Make small gains little by little. It's a long road regardless of how fast we try to go. Design your journey so that you're more likely to keep going.

I quit my full-time job with a software developer salary to try to create a software business on my own. I didn't know anything at the time. This is the story of how I spent seven months doing the wrong things.

Lessons learned from quitting my job and failing to start a business


I was lucky and got a software engineering job straight out of college. I joined a brand new team working on a brand new product. The product was an infant. It still needed basic things like analytics. The first few months were a rush. We were preparing for a launch on a big stage, working long hours, and writing a ton of code. This is what fresh college grads dream of.

Time passed by, and I started to grow complacent. The challenging problems to solve morphed from technical product challenges to organizational problems. It was a big company. There were a lot of dependencies, and each team had their own goals. As the naive college grad I was, I yearned for the days when it felt like we could focus on customer and product problems.

I ended up leaving that job for greener pastures. I got a new job that was a consulting firm commissioned by a larger company. I was more aware of big company politics going in. I joined a team tasked with a rewrite of a 15-year-old legacy system. I wrote a lot of code. The excitement of building things was there again. Like clockwork, that excitement started to fade. Work became tedious. It wasn't fulfilling.

## Scratching the Itch

I had been dabbling in side projects since college. I had an itch to start a company of my own around a software product. I discovered online forums like Indiehackers, which helped me find out about bootstrapping. Related things like [Startups for the Rest of Us] and the [Art of Product] inspired me. Entrepreneurship is what I wanted to do. I wanted to make my own product decisions. I wanted to write a lot of code.

So I set this goal to start a business. I didn't understand what it meant. I consumed a ton of content: advice, stories, lessons learned from people who had done it before me. I got the concept but failed to internalize any of it. I was bold. I knew what a product needed. If only I had enough time to work on it. I needed to go full time.

On November 8, 2019, I quit my cushy full-time dev job. I went from making $90/hr a full 40 hours a week to making nothing. I was mentally and financially prepared. With no debt, minimal expenses, and enough money in the bank to last a year, I took the leap.

The moment I had been waiting for was finally here. I was free to work on anything I wanted. I could finally spend all my time building the features I knew were going to make my side project a game-changing piece of software. It was going to be an instant hit.

![Gif of Polished Drag and Snap Functionality](/img/drag-and-snap.gif)

The idea was a text editor that helps you write. The prominent feature was a canvas interface. You could organize documents, images, web pages, and other media in two-dimensional space to explore your thoughts when you write. You would be able to drag and snap ideas together to outline faster. On top of this thought exploration tool, I would add all the nice little features I found in other apps. Focus mode from [iaWriter](https://ia.net/writer). Live markdown rendering like [Typora](https://typora.io/). Grammar checking and readability scoring from [Grammarly](grammarly.com) and [HemingwayApp](http://hemingwayapp.com/). Outfit it with integrations to platforms like WordPress so users can publish from the app when they finished.

## Death Spiral

If you're thinking, "Alright, that's a lot of features. Pump the brakes dude. You need to find some real customers." You're right.

Working on this idea on the side while I was employed was fun because there were many cool features to build. Comfortable jobs shielded me from the reality of the project, so it never needed to work. It was buggy and unreliable. I was going to fix that once I had enough time to dive deep into it.

I didn't switch gears to customer development as I should have. I told myself I need to add feature x, and the customers would arrive at my doorstep in masses. So I developed feature x. Nothing happened.

"Okay, so it's better because of feature x," I would think to myself, "but what it needs is feature y."

The whole thing became a death spiral. Feature y became feature z. I kept cycling from feature to feature thinking success was always right there within reach. I was making a lot of progress on the product, but I wasn't making progress on building a business. It became exhausting. Depression set in.

I would sink hours into video games while staring at a whiteboard full of tasks. A few days of this would go by, and I'd come back reinvigorated. 

"Okay, this is the feature set that's gonna do it," that ego-driven voice in my head would say. The ego is a pretty persuasive force.

## The Realization

I could feel the lack of progress taking its toll. Something wasn't right, but I wouldn't admit it to myself. I started doing weekly update calls with a friend. My enthusiasm for building features convinced them that I was on the right track at first. A little more hard work and focus would do the trick.

After a few updates, my friend caught on that I was spinning my wheels. They started to nudge me. Asking, "Is this the best use of your time?" I still thought so. It wasn't.

I started to ruminate on that. Deep down, I knew I wasn't spending my time wisely. I had that feeling in my gut. My brain hadn't accepted it yet.

Then it clicked. I let my guard down and admitted that I hadn't been doing the right things for the past seven months. I managed to ship a buggy, unreliable version of the product. I didn't have any prospective customers waiting for me to push updates and solve their problems.

I wrote a draft of this post and posted it to [Indiehackers](https://www.indiehackers.com/) and [Reddit](https://reddit.com). I got tons of feedback. Some positive, some negative, most of it encouraging. I connected with a few people who shared similar stories. That feedback helped me fully realize that I needed to take a step back. If I'm going to do this entrepreneur thing, I need to do it the right way. I can't build features blind. I need to solve a real problem.

## Righting the Ship

I'm taking a break from working on [Polished](https://polished.app) for a few weeks now. I'm going to explore some other ideas. More importantly, I'm going to talk to people first. I'm going to find a problem to solve before writing the code to solve it. I'm going to follow a lot of the bootstrapping advice this time. I'm going to work in public.

If I could go back to November 8, 2019, knowing everything I know now, I would still quit my job. Some say it was too early to leave since I didn't have any prospective customers. If I stuck to that rule, I would have been working a full-time job forever.

The big thing I would change is to start with a customer, not an idea. Everyone in the startup world talks about this. You've got to internalize it. The ego is a master of persuasion. It will guard ideas like a mother bear protecting it's young. Luckily, you can domesticate the bear that is your ego by consistently feeding it healthy thoughts based in reality that come from talking to other people. Be honest with yourself and prioritize people over ideas.

I'd also start as simple as possible. It's fun to think about hard problems and boldly proclaim you're going to solve them. But you should aim to build a first version that will take a week or two to code.

It may be garbage in comparison to your lofty goals. But if other people can use it, they'll help light your path. That path may end up leading to a cave containing hidden treasure. Or it might be a cliff with nowhere to go. Either way, you'll have only spent a week or two and not seven months.

## More to Come

If you enjoyed this post and want more, I'd love to connect. I'm starting with a [fresh idea](https://tidyworkspace.com) and working to validate it before building anything. I'll be writing about the journey and sharing the ups and downs. Follow here by subscribing below, on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/rywils21), or connect on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rywils21/). My DMs are always open. You can also email me at [ryan@ruminant.dev](mailto:ryan@ruminant.dev).

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Learning to Build in Public

Lessons learned from quitting my job and failing to start a business

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