Optimizing for Success

Re-evaluating mistakes from previous projects and the solutions we employed for our most recent project.

Photo by the blowup on Unsplash

As we continue to put the finishing touches on our newest project we took a trip down memory lane to revisit the failings of our previous projects and the lessons that we learned from them. This was, of course, done to ensure that the same mistakes were not made again in our latest project. We talked about the lessons that we learned in our previous projects in our story “Five Lessons Learned From Our First Failed App”, so in this story we wanted to expand on the value that came from our failures, how we improved in our newest project, and talk about new lessons that we learned.

Monetize Early

In our previous article, two of the lessons that we learned focused on the difficulty of deployment and knowing when cut our losses. These were hard lessons to learn, but learning them allowed us to learn a bigger lesson: monetize early. In our previous project, we focused on building everything from the ground up and left monetization to the end of the project. This proved to be a costly mistake as when requirements changed or when deployment took longer than expected we were left having to swallow the cost of development. Approaching a monetize early strategy allowed us to recoup some of our losses when issues like this occurred. But how do you a monetize a project that isn’t complete?

In answering this question, we realized that there was intrinsic value in the process of development, not just in the final form of our project. The issues that we were running into were faced by a other people across the world. Thus, whenever we hit a roadblock we would try to monetize our solution in some way. For us, our method of choice was to write Medium articles on topics that had caused us to invest a significant amount of time on research into them. One such early example of this was setting up a MySQL database pool in python. While the python documentation provided a way to set up the pool, it wasn’t intuitive. We ended up writing two articles on this topic (here and here) and they turned out to be some of our most popular articles.

Don’t just take our word for it. One of the best examples of this mentality can be seen in the origin story of AWS. As the Seattle Times reports, Amazon Web Services…