uditgoenka

It's been one of the most challenging project that we have ever built, but more imporantly, so excited to have built this..

Your feedback and suggestions are welcome.

You rightly stated it. This was a big learning lesson for me.

The word here here is "BLIND" trust.

Definitely its my fault, I take the blame as a Founder. Hence, I am sharing my learning and not pointing fingers at someone else. There is a difference.

When I was building PitchGround, this is what I did. My target audience were mostly small business owners, agencies and marketers.

So I built a community around these people and start providing them with value contents, started doing some webinars, partners and collaboration.

Built an initial set of audience, and then launched PitchGround.

I will always ask questions in the community, which I would use as a way to validate my idea, get feedback and more.

This helped me connect with my audience better. When I launched PitchGround, I already had initial audience to begin with.

I continue doing the same till date.

Build Contents to Build Distribution > Invite users to our community> Create Brand Awareness.

That's the general flow I follow.

Agreed. Always good to learn from other people, you never know at what point you might find which information helpful.

Very true. One can copy the product/idea but cannot copy the process and distribution.

Wrong hiring, wrong delivery, wrong expectations. Everything, and every decision was just a mess but since I have learned a lot.

I am based out of India, and its hard to find good quality developers here that was another big learning lesson for me.

I just edited the original post, and added a small backstory.

Not blaming anyone other than myself. These are my learning lessons. As a CEO, every decision falls on me.

Email Outreaching Tool to be more specific.

I had a total developer team of roughly 12+ working full time in the office.

My previous startups (Non-SaaS) which I had just sold.

I will keep this short.

I started working on my SaaS somewhere in 2016, and the first thing I did was hired a CTO. The person had around 3+ years of experience.

Not only was I paying a good salary, but I was also paying for his rent. When we started building the initial set of products, the overall product development kept getting delayed. He said we needed more developers, so we hired around 6-7+ developers.

All the developers were reporting my ex-CTO, and as per our mutual understanding, I was not allowed to have any say in how the product will be developed, and he will be offered full support and resources.

I agreed to that.

Several months passed, and the product was not ready, but I was also losing cash quickly. I was already under heavy stress because there was no flow of income for the product.

I met someone during this time who told me that I should launch my product, and some people will even buy during the alpha stage. I found it skeptical but fell for that trap because I was desperate to bring in more cash to keep the funding going on for the project.

This is where I made another mistake because I unknowingly ended up overpromising, and my team failed to deliver a quality product.

Over 1.5 years passed, and we still needed a stable product.

Over two years went by, and I still did not have a stable product, and this is when my ex-CTO quit, and a few other developers quit along with him when I realized that he used my resources to build his product and shortly flew out of the country.

..I ended up hiring an outside dev team with the little more money I had to keep my promise to the customers, but that did not go well either.

I had no money left; I had to shut the project completely because I had deep into reds and had gotten into heavy clinical depression.

This is the first time I am submitting something like this on Hackers News, so wasn't sure if I am allowed to post about the company details. But I can share more details if I am allowed.

I think what startups truly need is patience and a good mentor who have done it in the past. Most startup want to break things and move fast, burn capital. Instead, startups should move slow initially. Spend the first 5 years in the build phase and the next 5-years should be the growth phase.

I am so sorry to hear that.

It was definitely an expensive mistake but I wouldn't be where I am without learning from these mistakes.

Most of the funds were lost into building the product.

My ex-CTO used my resources to build something else. It was my fault that I trusted blindly.

UI and UX shouldn't be the priority when building an MVP. People often focus on this instead of focusing on making the product stable and suffer. The moment one stands building the next iteration of the product, that's exactly the right time to focus on UI/UX alongside considering all the feedback from the users.

Almost all the funds went into operations, mostly developers.

Almost all the funds went into operations.

Not everything is clickbait in the world. If that were the case, we won't have failure and success stories in the world.