Yogesh

Actionable lessons, insights, and hard truths on building a product, operation, and life.

I spent the last 6 months building Promptmonitor. Here's what I learned:

1. Early growth comes in bursts: we barely had revenue for first few months. We were stuck at the same MRR for months, nothing was working. Then we doubled in a month. Then grew another 50% the next. Growth doesn't come gradually, it comes in bursts.

2. Product > Distribution: a lot of people talk about distribution, and good distribution helps. Distribution becomes easier when the product is good. If it's not, no amount of marketing is going to help you.

3. Stop building and start marketing: once you have built the core features, focus on fixing bugs and marketing. Try out a few channels, see what works. Once you find the channel that works for you, double down on it. Read 'Traction' by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. This book helped me, it's full of actionable ideas.

4. Track your funnel, iterate weekly: implement web analytics immediately. Set up a funnel: how many people land on site → sign up → start a trial → convert. Every week, look at the numbers. Find your biggest drop-off point. Create a hypothesis for why people are dropping off, then test a fix next week. I changed things on Sunday and Monday, since I'm in Nepal I could build before the week started in US and EU. Sometimes it's confusing copy on pricing. Sometimes it's the placement of things. Sometimes it's the entire onboarding flow. Keep experimenting until something works, then keep that.

   I used to do this manually every week, pulling numbers from web analytics, Stripe, signups, trials, Google Search Console, all into a Google sheet. It was tedious but necessary. I'm now building Supalytics to make this easier, web analytics with revenue attribution so you can see which channels are actually bringing in money.

5. Users are (often) dumb: keep your app simple and easy to use. Work on the flows and ux. Reduce friction as much as possible, don't ask them to fill in too much info. Even the simplest thing that makes sense to you, users don't get it. Check Session replays, if you see them dropping off, not understanding the app, flows, not reaching different features or pages rework on it.

6. Emerging markets are high risk, high reward: in a new market, a lot of them are trying out multiple tools at the same time. They're not just looking for a solution, they're starting trials for every competitor simultaneously. Retention is harder when everyone is comparison shopping. But the opportunity is equally big. Every company, even the big ones, are trying to figure out and adopt these new tools. If your product is good and you can close, you have a real shot at landing clients you'd never reach in a mature market. The risk and the opportunity are on the same level.

7. Experiment with pricing: at early stage, you need to constantly experiment with pricing, some customers happily pay $200/mo, some say $29 is expensive. Either you are reaching the wrong audience, or the ROI doesn't justify the price, or the profit margins are too high. Unless you understand the market, and your ICP, it's going to take some time to figure out pricing. We are still trying to figure this out.

8. Things break all the time: no app is free of bugs, but bugs are not an issue. It's only the problem when it exists and you don't know about it. Sometimes there can be bug in onboarding, or payment, and you don't get new trials, customers etc. These things need to be tested time and again. Just keep an eye on Stripe, signups, onboarding_status, error rate in Vercel, and whether webhooks are getting resolved.

9. Make it easy for people to communicate with you: add live chat. Some people will inform you about bugs, and they really want to use the app. If someone goes out of their way to report a bug, that's a signal you're building something they actually want. I have few customers who reported bug and became a customer and still are.

10. Work hard, don't burn out: I worked from the moment I woke up to eleven, twelve at night. Barely left my room for months. Stopped going to the gym. Put on weight. Stopped feeling good about my body, my mind. I wouldn't recommend it, and I'm not doing it again. This is a long game. You have to keep going, wake up every day, ship, market, do the work. But pace yourself. Take care of your mental health, your physical health. You're nothing without your health.

11. It can get depressing: some weeks you don't get any customers, lose existing ones. The most difficult situation is when you don't know whats next. Whether its the next feature, bug fixing, marketing etc. If you don't know what you should be doing next, it can get depressing, you start questioning everything, overthinking, which leads to more confusion.

    You find clarity by taking action, not by thinking about it.

    And when you have direction, when you know whats next, your mind is clear. That's what keeps you going.