Iterating, How To Do It, and Why It's So Important

📲 The Cold Open

Lessons from the week.

Halfway through my study abroad trip in Spain, and I finally found a great balance between having fun and still getting work done. I finished up a trip to Barcelona, and successfully shipped V2 of my AI Customer Text Tool for a cleaning business. Today’s version will cover what I learned from that process, and how you can apply those lessons in your own ventures.

It’s A Product, Not A Project.

• Who’s The Product For?: Many first time founders have an idealistic image of what their company or product will look like, I know I did. But, it turns out that when you’re shipping real solutions, the only thing that matters is what the client / customer thinks. I love building things just to build (and that can be great to learn), but without customers, a “product” is just a project.

• Build For Them, Not Yourself: Tailor the product to your clients needs, not your vision. Drop the ego, and make solutions that work. With the AI Text Tool, that meant scrapping my grand idea of an all inclusive dashboard, and settling for a more easily implementable and deployable chrome extension. My client needed something that integrated into their existing workflow, not another complex dashboard to manage, so I had to adapt and deliver.

New Is Good.

• “I’ve Never Built That Before”: Building a new feature is scary. I’d never made a full stack production app before the AI Text Tool. Navigating both a backend and a frontend was brand new for me. But, to learn and improve, you just have to jump in the deep end and figure it out.

• Nothing Beats The Feeling Of Progress: You have to love the process of problem solving. That’s been by far my favorite part of this whole adventure so far. Few things are as satisfying as building a real tool for a real business that solves a real problem. Use that feeling as your core motivation. When you're fueled by the journey, not the destination , it's much harder to fail.

🗞️ MVPs Are Good, V2s Are Great

Iterating On Feedback

If you’ve been following Launch Letter for the past month, you’ll know I’ve been building an AI Text Tool for a house cleaning business. The cleaning sector requires a huge amount of communication. From pricing quotes, scheduling inquiries, to service complaints, it can be extremely time and resource intensive.

So, my product helps cut the time they spend coming up with responses to customers, by generating responses automatically using an AI that understands their company and their customer. But, describing my MVP like that would be disingenuous at best.

That version was just a starting point, nothing more. You always hear that building an MVP is the most important step in building a product. And technically its true. You have to build a first version if you want to get anywhere. But I’d argue that while an MVP is vital to starting, the second version of your product is much more telling in whether or not you’ll succeed.

Let me put it this way, building an MVP demonstrates a dedication to starting, but shipping a V2 shows a determination to keep going. Persistence is so crucial in this space. Approaching every problem with a consumer-first mindset, and staying flexible to their needs is crucial for success.

If you’ve shipped a V2, then you’ve already demonstrated you’re capable.

Now it’s time to get to work on V3.

✅ Goal Progress

This has been the first week I’ve felt good about my building progress in Spain. I feel like I’ve settled in a bit more, and found some free time to work on my projects. As I said earlier, I shipped V2 of my AI Text Tool, which felt great. I had to setup a proxy server with Netlify for an API call, which was all new for me, but it worked out.

On the Launch Letter / Content Creation side of things, I started tweeting again consistently, which is great. But, I need to come up with a concrete plan to actually turn this into growth. I’m going to try to post a TikTok every day for this next week and see what happens.

Although the bars below tracking my goals haven’t moved very much the last 3 weeks, the payment for my work on V2 will come in soon and I’ll be more than halfway to done on that goal. Hopefully continuing to increase my presence online can draw some subscribers here for the second goal!