After building and investing in successful as well as unsuccessful products, alongside synthesizing hundreds of articles, podcasts, tweets, Paul Graham essays, and conversations with successful software founders/investors—there is no standardized formula nor perfect checklist to ensure a viral product; however, building for an actual problem, performing tons of customer discovery and listening to users, and staying lean is most likely your best bet in positioning your product for success.
When I founded my first consumer software startup as a freshman @NYU, I was incredibly scrappy and secured seed funding from NYU Stern’s Social Impact Fund; however, I failed due to a lack of experience and guidance as a first time founder. This is a guide that serves as a roadmap for founders/builders like freshman year Trustin, and in general, both novice and seasoned founders as well as indie hackers who are looking to better systemize their process in building online products and mitigate risk of failing product-market fit.
I synthesized all my learnings into this Coda doc as an interactive roadmap filled with actionable items, strategies and mental frameworks that I hope will be useful to people (and myself for future ventures) looking to build their own digital products — whether it be a side micro-SaaS project for passive income or have dreams to make a full fledged, VC-backed startup.
with +25k active readers, which brings you weekly case studies on how successful tech companies gained their first 1000 users! Highly recommend subscribing and applying learnings from his newsletter to take action on your own product in this interactive guide.
Homebrew’s 50+ HR Resources for Startups
I’ve also worked with the Homebrew team to open source the most comprehensive guide for startups building out their HR.