A couple of months ago I join YC’s Startup School where I started developing the MVP for ArtsySpace, an online community of people that enjoy decorating their homes. When I joined startup school I had only an idea for what I wanted to be a side project. There were group session, where you get to pitch your idea to other founders which was a really helpful way to get feedback and put your ideas to test.

During Startup School, there was a lesson by Michael Seibel where he is going over a slide that states Some understanding of the problem is very helpful when building an MVP so plese talk to your users before writing code. After that lesson I reached out to anyone I saw as a potential user to talk to them and also remove many features I wanted to add to the MVP. I felt good with the problem research phase and started developing the MVP for ArtsySpace.

There were many technical problems, but for the MVP I just wanted to release fast to see if there was an interest. So after about of month of building the MVP of ArtsySpace during my free time I decided to release it. So I went and posted on Indie Hackers, Reddit and LinkedIn. I thought that if the product was at least somewhat interesting people will sign up or post.

I was pretty excited when I checked Google Analytics to see that I was getting some views on ArtsySpace. So Google Analytics was showing visits from users after posting on online forums. Not only that I was getting users from France to Russia which was awesome to see.

But my hype didn’t last long and I then realized that althought I was getting visitors people weren’t signing up. But I was being naive to think that users will just come and sign up. So I shared it in decoration forums and still I wasn’t getting users to sign up. So I wrote a post on Indie Hackers asking: I have spent 2 weeks trying to find market fit should I quit?, where even the founder of IH Courtland Allen commented.

Based, on the feedback I realised theres a long way to go. I was being naive thinking that product market fit would just come around the block once I launched. So now I’m in the search of how to improve my side project with the best approach I have come to appreciate talk with users. Maybe this side project doesn’t grow, maybe it will but what a great learning experience this has been.