Lessons learned from our first year of starting remind101
I was scrolling through the press we've received for remind101 and came across the first piece of media that picked up on us from the State News. I was on a 2 week camping trip with Jon & Glenn, about to go on the most ridiculous Mountain Biking excursion in Moab Utah I've ever done (16 Miles, Kona full suspension...a thing of beauty).
My eyes widened as I read the article...holy cow, is this real? #cool.
As I sit here a year later and reminisce about what we've went through with remind101 I realized 3 very simple things that my lack of experience and quite honestly, pride stopped me from doing.
1. Make your product simple
2. Talk to users
3. Solve a problem
From the look on our home page design, you'd think it was simple. However, when you got in the system users were often confused. This is an easy fix if I would have talked to users. But we didn’t. I didn't take enough time to actually sit down and watch users go through the site. I wrote about my first lessons in California last week on how I've been doing user testing. It's not rocket science and I've read all the blogs that say how to do it, but I didn’t. Of course the most important lessons is to solve a problem. We've really had to buckle down and ask ourselves who's problem are we really solving. Turns out, we were making MORE work that solving a problem and providing value to our users.
The good news is, I learned and we're fixing the issues. We've done a hefty amount of user testing and are honing in on the real problem we're solving. If you are about to start a company, don't make the same mistake I did and follow 123!
