What You Can Learn From My Mistakes
For a long time, I thought the way to succeed with side projects was to just keep building. My process looked something like this:
- Get excited about an idea
- Design the whole thing in Photoshop (at the time)
- Build the MVP
- Launch quietly
- Tweak the landing page
- Wonder why no one’s signing up
- Add more features
- Repeat step 7
It felt productive. I was always working on something. But nothing ever really got traction — and definitely didn’t make money. It drove me crazy.
The Turning Point: When I Stopped Adding Features
What finally changed my mindset was reading The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. It’s a book about bottlenecks in manufacturing, but it applies perfectly to building products:
If you improve anything that isn’t the constraint, you’re just adding complexity.
Once I started thinking in terms of constraints, everything shifted.
What I Changed (and What Finally Worked)
Instead of asking, “What should I build next?”
I started asking: “What’s actually stopping someone from paying me?” That’s “the” goal.
In most cases, it wasn’t a missing feature. It was something embedded in the process of something that already existed, like:
- The landing page headline was vague—so users never clicked the download button
- The signup form asked for too much info—so users never got to experience the product
- The onboarding showed users how to use the app, but not why—so users never got value
After a while, I figured out that every step of the “funnel” is important, but especially the step right before people fall off. That’s your bottleneck.
Why A Great Build Wasn’t Enough
I develop apps as a freelancer now. One client I worked with had a really solid product — great retention, real customer results — but almost no one was converting. The problem wasn’t the tool. It was the storytelling.
We added a simple “How It Works” page: a clean, visual 3-step walkthrough that explained exactly what the product did and why it mattered. That alone gave them a meaningful boost in conversions and helped unlock their path to 7-figure ARR.
Not because we added more! Just because we focused on the real constraint.
TL;DR You’ve built enough, now find the point where people get disinterested and fix that.
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