I failed.

Lovewall failed.

Because after thousands of pageviews and conversations with people who we thought would be our customers, James and I have slowly figured out that we built something kinda useless.

5 Lessons I Learned

1. In B2B, it’s tough to convince people to switch from what they’re already using

There are many reasons not to switch:

• Existing integrations
• Stored data
• Familiarity

You’ll have to be 10x better at getting the job done to convince anyone to switch to your solution.

2. Sell painkillers or steroids

Similar to my last point, if your product is just “nice to have” then there’s no real reason for businesses to use it.

Prove that you can:

• Make them more money (steroids)
• Save them money (painkiller)

3. Reddit is great for experimentation

Each subreddit is its own country.

You can do “mini-launches” within different subreddits to test out the viability of an idea.

• Find where your users hang
• Talk to them there

You’ll get hundreds, if not thousands, of eyeballs on your product. And tons of useful feedback.

(Redditers won’t hold back on harsh feedback either.)

4. Money = Validation

• Not compliments
• Not pageviews
• Not upvotes
• Not likes

Until the money hits your Stripe account, don’t be certain of anything.

5. Experience is the only teacher

Only the market is correct.

No matter what ideas you think will “work”, your customers have the last say.

It’s one thing to read about advice or strategy in a book or in a tweet. It’s another thing to actually try something, fuck up, and then learn from your missed shots.

Doing the real thing is the best only way to learn.

Moving Forward

We messed up when we started building from our own imagination instead of based on burning needs of people and businesses.

The plan now is to make sure we validate, validate, validate.

James and I had a call at night of launch day where we regrouped to figure out where we go from here.

Here’s the gameplan:

It’s a bit rough at the moment but this is basically our Notion workspace for our new idea validation process.

It’s nothing innovative. Here’s what we’ll do:

1. Listen and start conversations in active subreddits.
2. Look at what people complain about.
3. Craft a potential solution for it.
4. Create a super simple landing page based on that solution.
5. Gauge demand by asking for emails.
6. Create a 2nd more fleshed out site for the good ideas share them to show progress. (Allows us to gauge demand a second time)
7. Repeat steps 1-6 for dozens of ideas.
8. Take the viable ideas, craft pitches, then run them by pre-seed investors.

It’s a real “measure twice, cut once” approach.

A process that’ll help us avoid building a full product without proven demand.

I’ll keep you posted on the progress.

See you soon.

Update:

As I was writing this, Lovewall had its 1st conversion since the Product Hunt launch haha 🥳

We’ll see what happens.

See you soon.