Let me tell you about one of my business miss-adventures.
You see, I like to experiment, try different ideas, games, business models and all the other things most of which never saw a light of day. I will tell you about them some other time, the only reason why I am wasting your time with this prolonged intro is one important lesson I learned from them.
Before you take a loan and hire people, check that you actually have customers.
Not customers in your pretty head, real customers.* My pretty head 2024
That is something I seem to keep forgetting and failing at. It’s true for games, products and really anything.
Now that brings us to my failure of a timer app. My latest (almost) brilliant idea was to develop a Productivity Timer app for game developers. But today after many, many failures I hope I learned my lesson and instead of spending a weekend developing my app… I asked if anyone wants it first.
(If you wanna be fancy, I did market research and product validation)
Here was my pitch:
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So I am looking into developing Productivity Timer as a web app, it would let you just start working with one click. Track your projects and displays how much you spend on different project with graphs (per time, project etc…) + export that data.
It could be also linked with chrome extension to automatically block you from accessing distracting websites (Social media etc…)
Here is a mock up: https://imgur.com/a/beBA17G
I am mainly thinking of this being useful for personal use, solo devs or for someone who, like me wants keep track of his/hers time. Not across studio.
—
So, I took my brilliant and definitely grammatically correct pitch, reformatted into a message and posted on the world’s most polite game dev forum.
r/gamedev on Reddit
To my surprise I didn’t get banned right away. So far so good.
That’s when it ended tho, there wasn’t much interest in the idea. I got downvoted almost down to 9GAG and comments were somewhat impolite.
Alright, I can take a hit.
To be fair, the whole point of this was to check if there is anyone interested in this productivity timer.
Inflicted emotional damage aside, that’s the nature of Reddit. The important point was that I spend 15 minutes writing a pitch and asking people instead of spending two days making MVP with likely the same result.
Please don’t get me wrong. There would be many benefits of showing up with working MVP right away, but it simply isn’t worth the effort at this stage with this idea.
There was another important benefit I got from conversation two redditors had under my comment.
One Redditor was somehow insulted by idea anyone would need a chrome extension to block social media websites, but another Redditor argued with him, that even tho that is the case for normal people (Author note: it’s not but whatever) the neurodivergent people, specifically with ADHD really need it.
Let’s ignore a point that social media are designed to trap you no matter your diagnoses. The Redditor number two has got a point.
I personally have a need for extension like that… Could it be because I have ADHD? Or more likely could my ADHD make this need stronger?
Pivot time! Maybe people with ADHD could be a lot more interested in Pomodoro Timer app like this.
I rewrote my pitch so the app would be more helpful to my new target audience and asked again on r/ADHD
I am looking into developing a Productivity Timer as a web app, it would let you just start working with one click. It could also include projects you work on with more data and/or ToDo checklist for specific Pomodoro session you could prep and then go through.
It could be also linked with chrome extension to automatically block you from accessing distracting websites (Social media etc…)
Here is a mock up: https://imgur.com/a/beBA17G
Well?
It went better, but still not great.
The post got largely ignored. Not much upvotes nor downvotes, just about 600 views. It did gather some interest tho, one person even DMed me asking if they could help test it.
This is not quite enough for me to develop it, but it’s a lot better than where I started. There is at least some interest.
Maybe the product needs to change more?
Probably.
Ideal approach would be to keep iterating and working on the idea until I find a target audience that’s really excited about it.
It’s not interesting enough for me to continue, so I will drop it. I hope describing this process gave you some idea how and why validating product or service is important before building it.
By no means am I trying to lecture here, but hopefully sharing a bit of story will be helpful to you.
Good luck!
Vojta.Blog 
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