What I learned while creating Helpful v1

I built the first version of Helpful (helpfulbird.com) over the last 2 months.

It's ugly and the signup flow needs work, but I ended up with two useful features:

Follower questions 🤝
Helpful searches your followers' tweets and shows you questions that they're asking. Great for building better relationships with your followers and helping them out.

Search questions 🎯
Helpful searches Twitter for a particular term that you enter and returns any question tweets that relate to this term. This works well for finding new followers to engage with and

Here are some stats:
⌛ 90 hours of development time invested (70 hours personal time / 20 hours contractor time)
👀 129 people visited the site.
🎉 15 people signed in to check it out.
🚀 1 person still actively using it after a few weeks, not including myself.

Things I learned along the way:

I need to keep the scope of these products very focused.

Seems obvious, but 6 weeks just isn't much time to ship something significant. I ended up cutting the scope of the product down more than I wanted.

Don't try to do too many things at once.

I had big plans at the beginning of the year to manage two client contracts and also develop products and I quickly got overwhelmed. I ended one of my client contracts after a couple weeks, but I basically lost the first 3 weeks of the year.

Delegating early in the process is difficult.

During the overwhelm, I tried delegating some work to a contractor, but it didn't work out well. Ended up redoing the application setup and significant parts of the code. Once a product is heading in a good direction, then I might possibly be able to bring in some help, but it doesn't work to explore an idea and delegate simultaneously when there's so little time.

Marketing is hard, but building in public is pretty cool.

I have no idea what I'm doing with marketing/Twitter/#buildinpublic/etc. But having people try out the app just from periodic updates and getting real feedback right away is great. Having those conversations definitely helped the app evolve into something more useful over a short time and it's energizing to have someone using what you've made.

Follower data is tough to work with.

Data on followers isn't easy to get from the Twitter API, because this isn't really how Twitter is designed to work. I probably shouldn't have spent so much time on this feature. Unless it proves to be very useful, will likely scrap it down the road.

Test coverage is worth it.

I decided to build this app without following my usual practices for automated tests. I was hoping it would speed things up, but I'm not convinced it helped much. Maybe some, but now I have an app that could be difficult to update without breaking things and I'll have to pay that technical debt back down the road. Doesn't seem like a sustainable approach, so I won't be doing that going forward.

So what's next for Helpful?

I'm moving into marketing mode now. Planning to:

1. Update the landing page.
2. Improve the onboarding experience.
3. Talk to more people on Twitter about it.
4. Start posting some of the questions I find.
5. Post to some early access sites like BetaList.
6. What else should I try?

If I can get 25 active users, then I'll consider adding more features or making a premium/paid version.

What's next overall?

I'm currently planning product #2 for the year. Development will start next week and I'll be posting updates as I work, so if you're interested, follow me here or over on Twitter: @ryanstrickler.

What else can I share that would help you?

Any questions for me? Or additional info you'd like to know?