Overcoming years of mindless building to finally making my first successful product
That took me more time of course, but having users that could let me test the design and functionality every day, I felt like I was building a product for a real audience, something that I only experienced in full-time occupation. It was a stark difference to how I built products before — alone and depressed, writing code for months with no feedback, never knowing if what I am doing actually matters.
Breakup
But it wasn’t always smooth sailing. As I’ve originally mentioned, I wasn’t the one who created the community. Discord server has been created by a different person, who was generally off-hands everything that was going on. Which made it easy for me to go all out and grow the community.
But as my ambitions grew, his dissatisfaction with my approaches also grew. When I started making the website, I’ve started talking about how huge is the opportunity here. I also started to suggest where I think the society should go, but he had a different opinion: keeping the community small and not adding many features to the website.
As I continued to develop the website and with the increasing number of people excited about the new direction, I was sure he’ll see the potential and change his mind.
But alas, that didn’t change. When I finished the website’s events page and got around half of our users to register on the website, I knew a decision had to be made. I couldn’t continue investing so much time and effort into this endeavour, when someone else, akin to a co-founder at startup, could nullify all of my hard work.
So I made a proposal to take up the helm of the Discord server and handle the whole community, while he would still retain admin privileges and have a say in the future decisions, while the final say would still be up to me. But that didn’t come to pass as I was immediately banned from the server. It was done in the name of “minimising potential malicious actions from me”, which was understandable, although felt a bit extreme.
It was a tough decision, but one that had to be done. I had to let go of all the hard-earned users, over 250 at the time, which was the biggest userbase I’ve ever had.