7 Things I have learned on my founder journey
What I would do differently if I were to build a startup from scratch again
Like many of you, I’ve been working remote-first style since COVID hit us all in 2020.
For the last two years, I’ve been working on my startup EnVsion. We’re building the knowledge repository to help companies make better and faster decisions from the insights contained in their video calls. Our first use case is UX research: EnVsion already helps user researchers save time and turn their user interview videos into bite-sized insights that they can share with the rest of the team so that they can build the right product for their audience.
I would like to say that this is what we started working on from day 1, but this is far from the truth. It took us a while to home in on this specific problem and iterate accordingly on the product. It’s been a very challenging, but rewarding journey nonetheless. We are still far from our ideal destination, but I thought now was a good time to begin sharing some learnings from my founder journey so far. Below are 7 things I learned in the last 18–24 months. To be frank, I knew some of these things already, but maybe I had to experience them before I could internalise these learnings. Here they are:
Start with a real problem
Talk to people facing this problem
Don’t quit your job before there is real interest in your product
Invest in marketing from day one
Talk to fellow founders before fundraising
Be part of a community that aligns with your values
Don’t wait until it’s perfect: ship good code early
I will be sharing more in-depth thoughts for each of the learnings above over the next few weeks. In the meantime, it may be a good time for some of you too to reflect on how you could do things differently if you were starting your company again.
Thanks for reading this post! I share my learnings and progress while building my startup EnVsion! At EnVsion, we’re creating the central repository for UX researchers and product teams to unlock the insights from their user interview videos. And of course we use AI for this ;).
EnVsion is for you if you’re a UX researcher or product manager who is overwhelmed by the hours of video recordings from calls with users and customers. We help you highlight the key moments from these calls so that you and your team can make better product decisions.
Nice reflections Eddie. 🙌