Entrepreneurship is overrated

"If you are a developer, you can just make your own products."

It's not that easy! Building is just one part of making a successful product.

You will also need:

🎯 Product-Market Fit

• Identify a real problem that needs solving
• Validate that enough people actually want your solution

Well, yeah most likely, but your product could be an improvement over existing products or a cheaper alternative.

📣 Marketing

You need to do consistent marketing to attract customers, people need to know your product exists and trust it.

A big misconception is that once you put your product online, users will magically find it.
That's not true.

At first, your website will rank very low on search engines because it's not recognized yet.
Publishing blog posts can help over time, boosting your SEO after a few months.
Sharing your app on social media can also help you get your first users and boost your rank on search engines.

🔍 Customer Feedback

• Talk to your customers early and often
• Make sure you're building what they actually need

🛠️ Support

• Fix unexpected bugs quickly
• Respond to user issues and feature requests

⏰ Time Management

• Balance building new features with running the business
• Avoid burnout while wearing many hats

💲 Pricing

• Build a pricing strategy that reflects your product's value
• Consider different pricing models (subscription, one-time payment, freemium)

💰 Funding

When you want to scale your product, or if you're building something that requires more resources, you'll need funding.

You'll have expenses like hiring, buying infrastructure, running ads, etc. An investor might give you [X] amount of money and mentor you, in exchange for [Y]% ownership in your company.

This happens after you convince them that you and your product are worth investing in.

Sometimes, investors might want to be part of the decision-making process, like choosing the product direction...

🔄 Conclusion

And that's still not everything...

Building products requires much more than engineering skills. It combines technical expertise with business, marketing, and customer understanding.

That's why working with a team, people with different skills, can massively improve your chances of success.

What other challenges have you faced when building your own products?

PS: I've only had a short experience building some small products, so feel free to correct me if am wrong.