Lessons from failing horribly

I worked like a dog on this startup. Very little sleep. Marketing in the day, dealing with devs at night. Bootstrapping.

LinkedIn + cold email outreach was working amazing for our agency and I wanted to SaaS-ify it. I wanted cool marketing automation-type drag and drop sequences but built for multi channel cold outreach.

It was still early, before major platforms added features like that.

Product was finished. But it was glitchy. I was itching to launch it. I had gauged interest and everyone wanted this thing.

I went ahead and launched it with glitches. Unfortunately, some of the glitches were pretty bad. Onboarding was dismal, cold email automation was glitchy (NOT good for a cold outreach system), and I was overwhelmed.

After tons of free trials and no paid users (and very little marketing), I stopped. I took a quick hiatus. I worked on other shit. I told the dev team it just wasn't good enough. We stayed in touch and I decided to give it another go. "Let's take our time, test this thing, get results, and release a solid product".

Now, I'm relaunching this thing and I'm extremely excited.

Lessons I've learned in this process:

Good marketing doesn't solve for a bad or glitchy product - both product and marketing have to be immaculate
Development teams are just development teams. If you're not a coder, you need to give clear direction, be persistent, pay decently, and test, test, and test again. Thinking they just know your vision and will do it flawlessly is living in a dream world.
Slow down and take your time. I'm in a marketplace now where none of these features are revolutionary. But.. I'm actually kind of happy about that because people are more educated about what these features mean. I can add things like proven one-click templates, education, and training into the picture so they get more value than just the features. First mover advantage as a MOAT is real, but stress can kill you...
Use failure as inspiration. Money and time wasted, it would have been easy to give up. My selfishness and stubbornness paid off thankfully. Keep pushing, keep pivoting, put your passion into anything you do and do it just for the love of it. Nothing else matters. Not money, not fame - just for the love of building shit and seeing dreams become reality.

Alright that's it for now! Ya'll keep pushing and never give up.