Founders, the first few customers that use your product are probably going to run into embarrassingly bad bugs - but that is kind of unavoidable, so don't get discouraged. No matter how much you test, it is impossible to guess what users are actually going to do in your app - so you are going to miss a ton of use cases. The key is to resolve those bugs with crazy intensity, like it's a life or death scenario. My last startup, Reflektive, eventually got to $20M ARR. But our first customer, Quantcast, ran into some bugs that were embarrassingly bad. The product we launched first at Reflektive were 360 Performance Reviews. Our first customer wanted to use us to do a 360 for the Quantcast executive team (the C levels and VPs at a 300+ person company). Talk about high stakes and high visibility. Not a friendly beta if you know what I mean. A day after we launched, I got a call from our buyer. The CEO filled out a performance review for one of his direct reports, and the autosave didn't work, and the whole review he wrote was gone. Holy sh$$ what am I going to do? When I got this call I was freaking out and my stress level shot up. I still have PTSD from this moment. I panicked for a moment then turned my adrenaline productive and figured out a solution. I found the data he lost in our logs, and restore it manually by copying and pasting it back in. To me, it was the biggest fail that could have possibly happened, even after it was resolved. But, because I jumped on the fire and resolved it, we somehow didn't lose Quantcast as customers. In fact, they expanded and used Reflektive for the 300+ employees. Also, I eventually ended up hiring our buyer, Rachel. So I guess she didn't hate me after all after that big F up :) Follow me for more founder advice.
Thanks for sharing Rajeev Behera errors are unavoidable, key to success is how one responds to the situation 👏
This is very encouraging to know that we aren't the only startup to have bugs in our early application!
Business Leader @ Devsinc 🚀 Sharing stories on startups, money and mindset | 4x Founder | Investor in 25+ startups | Many failures, few successes. ⚖️
1moGreat story. Speed to resolution is the most important (and I bet that shared trauma no doubt built bonds on increased trust).