5 things learned from launching my first app and getting my first 20 users

After several attempts at building and launching my own products, for my 24th birthday I decided I was going to launch something, finished or not, and I was going to try to get people to use it.

I had this idea of a web app that lets me browse music livestreams from youtube and quickly change or find new ones so I built: worktunes.co

And to my surprise in an afternoon I had something "usable".

Here's what I learned:

1. Cut down on features.

I decided to get the minimum thing that would let users do what I want, listen to cool music while they work.

Since I thought that people would want to use it while they work from their computers I didn't bother making it look good on the phone (It's on the roadmap).

I want it to do so many things:

• let users add to favorites the stations they like the most.
• let users share stations (right now there's no router configuration so everything is in one place)
• let users upload their own links to livestreams to share
• Give likes to stations, show how many people are using them

But that doesn't matter, first you launch something.

2. Tech stack doesn't really matter.

At first I was thinking of learning Next but I wanted it done in a day so I went with what I already knew.

• Vuejs
• Firebase
• Netlify.

3. If you don't let people use it you don't really know what you have to do next

I mean you "kinda" know what to do next, you can do whatever you want. But that's not really what could make your product grow, you don't really know what could make your product grow until you have your first users and they like it and they want to give you feedback. Letting people use the product as soon as possible was the best decision.

4. Share with the community

I realize now that the best way to grow as a developer and grow the products that I like (whether they are made by me or not) is sharing what I learn and what I do with the community. I don't really have a following on twitter so I can't get 100 users per day just by sending a tweet but maybe I could help 100 people and they would find my product and enjoy it.

5. Monetization will come later

Monetization is probably what slowed me down the most with my previous attempts at launching apps. I would get caught up in the business side and never get out until I'm too tired and don't want to work on it anymore. I don't really care about monetization for worktunes. If I come up with a way to monetize it later when more people are using it, great, if not, I will build something else.

Anyway those are my thoughts. I wanted to write them down to see clearly the things I have learned this past 24h so I thought I'd share them here.

Have a good weekend