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Overheard a guy at the coffee shop near Campus Martius talking about how his startup wasted 6 months on a feature nobody wanted
I was grabbing a latte and this dude was telling his friend they built this whole analytics dashboard before even talking to 10 potential customers. They spent $15k on dev time and when they finally showed it to people, everyone just wanted a simple export button. Made me think about how easy it is to over-engineer stuff instead of just asking first. Anybody else ever catch yourself building something cool but useless cause you didn't check first?
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phoenix_lewis5d ago
Wait, the guy dropped $15k on a dashboard before talking to a single person? That's insane, you can go ask questions for free.
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cooper.drew5d ago
Pretty sure my last startup was held together by assumptions and duct tape. Spent three months building a custom CRM tool for local businesses, turns out they just wanted a shared Google Sheet with some color coding. By the time I asked a single business owner I was already $2k deep into development and had this whole "intelligent lead scoring" system that nobody asked for. Guess who learned to start with a piece of paper and a pen instead of a whole codebase.
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Interesting take but I actually see it a little different. Sometimes you need to build something to really understand what people want, and a simple conversation won't always uncover the real need. @lunah12 your tagging system might have taught you something valuable about what users actually reach for first.
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lunah125d ago
Jumped into a project myself last year without checking first. Spent two weeks building a whole tagging system nobody used cause they just wanted a basic search bar.
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