Hey! I'm the author of this blog post. If you have any questions, let me know!<p>One of the lessons I omitted (because the post was getting a bit long), is we started off as cross-platform (Slack, Teams, and Discord) but in the end we decided to focus on a single product.<p>In retrospect, we've struggled to decide if that's a lesson to learn. Should we have started with a single platform? It certainly makes it much faster to build for a single platform. But at the time, we really thought the cross-platform chat-ops would be a distinguishing trait!<p>Anyways, I hope you enjoy the post!
> Lesson: Start with selling a Product not a Platform<p>Good advice. People rarely want a platform, especially from a new entrant. They want an aspirin tablet.<p>Once they are hooked you can expand.
direct thoughts:<p>> Balance your early engineering and infrastructure with achieving Product Market Fit<p>No, not really, you should focus way more on the latter really. We devs love the first tho.
e.g. comment from your original post 12mo ago: "Super stoked to see you launching after working on it for so long!" -> how much of the code you've written was necessary to come to the realization you eventually came to? Based on the way you described your trouble selling, seems like very little to none.<p>- Azure seems like a bad choice (running out of capacity lolwut)<p>- corollary to above: don't get too attached to where you worked. Seems like your original idea was heavily based on something u saw internally. Just because something works well at one (usually large) company you worked at doesn't mean it serves a widespread market need (I've been burned by this).<p>Just some thoughts, hopefully your pivot is successful!
Can you talk a little more in detail about your tech stack? Perhaps it would help more readers like me who are curious given your history in the .NET space.
Those lessons on Azure are fairly generally applicable. A lot of the services seem to be lacking/overkill somehow, in that either a service is too basic to be useful, or it's been needlessly specialised to fit a (probably brief and now outdated) marketing requirement.
"Start with selling a Product not a Platform" -> reminds me a lot of this PG piece: <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html</a>