An idea is born
“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win”
Sun Tzu
About 8 years ago I was working with some session musicians on an EP, and I felt moderately inconvenienced by the fact that I had to manually write out notes and timestamps to share ideas and feedback with them. Collaboration was a bit of a pain, file sharing was a mess, and at the time I was writing music daily - so this wasn’t an intermittent inconvenience either.
Naturally, I decided to build a SaaS.
I wrote up a PDF with my perceived problem statement and formulated a hypothesis that this must be a problem that’s experienced by professionals on a much larger scale. In that PDF I imagined that for someone like Hans Zimmer and his production studio working on the next Hollywood blockbuster this must be a legitimate problem - if each person on his team spent half an hour a day writing notes, timestamps and emails this would probably add up to 10s of thousands in lost productivity per year.
Fast-forward to 2025 and Hans Zimmer is using my competitor’s software. My hypothesis was on the right track - but I ultimately lacked the experience that would allow me to avoid pitfalls that in hindsight seem so obvious.
Here are some of my mistakes, failures, and what I learnt from them.
Execute, execute, execute
For various reasons I didn’t start real work on this project until January 2022.
This was my first tech product, and after around 6 months of working on it part-time I came to realise my first lesson:
Discipline and daily progress isn’t optional.
This is pretty obvious to most, and I think most people figure it out quite quickly. If you care about something then your life needs to revolve around it.
You live it, you breathe it, you obsess over it daily - that’s your entry fee.
That’s what it costs just to sit at the table and have a chance to play.
But by no means does it guarantee that you’ll win.
It doesn’t matter if you’re tired, it doesn’t matter if you had a bad day at work - you have to find a way around it to make sure that you are progressing daily.
At the time I worked a 9-5 at a PropTech company, and for 2 years as soon as it hit 5PM I’d get up from my desk, go run a mile, come back and take a cold shower, and that would give me just enough juice to unplug myself from “business needs” and deadlines and whatever corporate nonsense I had to deal with that day, and give me a solid few hours of work on what I wanted to work on.
To reiterate:
Pouring everything you’ve got into your work isn’t negotiable; it’s the entry fee.
Tunnel vision
For the next 2 years, I poured myself into this product. Like any first time founder, solopreneur or indie-hacker, I obsessed over every detail - this wasn’t just a product, this was an extension of me.
I was naively self-righteous and selfless in my obsession over tiny details, and there was almost some form of arrogance in my thinking that I’m not like those other guys who pedal shovelware - I care about my end user! - my code is good, clean and maintainable, and I can fix bugs in minutes.
Well, the first big lesson that I eventually got to learn was that just because you understood step 1 - hard work is the cost of entry - and you care about your end user, if your product doesn’t solve a core need that your customer knows about and cares enough about to want to fix, no amount of features will get you to product/market fit.
Jason Cohen has a fantastic article on the subject, and his blog is an absolute goldmine that I wish I’d found a couple of years earlier.
Just because a problem exists doesn’t guarantee that it’s a viable business model
Here’s the thing - all of this can be avoided if you simply do what every VC and startup accelerator tells you to do - go and talk to your customers.
Analyse the basic needs of your user, and analyse the market. Would people really be willing to pay for your solution? Do they trust you enough to buy from you specifically? Is the market big enough?
And most importantly, is it enough of a problem that people are aware of it, and are willing to do something about it?
Failure to prepare
Another huge mistake that feels so obvious in hindsight is neglecting a growth strategy.
Growth strategy is frequently lumped together with marketing, but there are subtle but important differences.
Marketing is your ideal customer profile, how you speak to your target audience, the message that you convey to show to your users that you can solve their problem.
Growth strategy is a systematic approach that allows you to test different growth channels, and different tactics within those channels. You can experiment with your growth strategy and iterate on what works based on data that you gather.
I did none of that.
I had some semblance of a plan prior to launch - the usual Product Hunt, press and Reddit route, supplemented by some social ads, and then just see what works and do more of that.
In reality though, by failing to come up with a viable growth strategy I’d lost half the battle without knowing.
“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win”
If you fail to get a strong growth strategy in place while you were working on your product, then you’re more than likely going to lose when you do launch.
As Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares outline in their Traction book (mandatory reading by the way), you need to split your time 50/50 for product AND growth.
Growth is not some magical thing that happens to you because you stayed up late making your buttons look nice.
Growth is something that is achieved deterministically through preparation and strategy.
From the outside looking in, it’s easy to assume that startups who manage to hit PMF hit crazy growth because they’ve been funded. Surely once you’ve secured a few million in funding and you have access to great marketing talent and a sizable budget, then traction is this thing that magically happens because you throw money at it?
Well no, actually. Far from it.
Whether or not you want to raise capital, it’s helpful to look at your product from a VC perspective - it’s 2025, startups aren’t getting funded based on ideas alone. VCs want to see traction and growth, and startups that will grow with or without their cash - their investment is simply meant to get them there quicker.
So the takeaway here is:
Your primary goal as a startup is traction, and your tool to get there is your growth strategy - and it is equally as important as your product.
And another helpful thing to remember - in the early stages you’re building a startup, not a company. Your job is to develop something that can go from 0 to 100 as quickly as possible, and grow as big as you can - your product will look very different once you get out of the startup phase and your business priorities shift.
Narrow focus, big goals.
Scope creep
Michael Siebel of YC talks about how product people tend to default to trying to resolve problems by iterating on their product instead of talking to their users, and I was definitely one of those people.
The desire to release a product was so strong that it blinded me to some obvious issues. I had a decent core idea - collaborative private workspace for professional musicians where they can leave comments directly on audio waveforms, and share files easily - but I also decided that for some reason I needed to implement a team calendar, a fully fleshed out chat and messaging system (that with the exception of video calls effectively had feature parity with Facebook Messenger), and a contacts system.
About 8 months after launch I ended up gutting those features, when I realised that your core product is far, far more important than any secondary features that you add.
Looking back on it now, I think I was trying to justify the existence of this product by making it bigger than it needed to be.
As a general rule of thumb, this is a pretty simple framework that I’ll use moving forward:
Trial by fire
August 2024, launch.
At the time it felt terrifying, exhilarating, and I had no idea what to expect. Looking back on it, it’s a lot like the Tri-Solarian trials in The Three Body Problem - you make a hypothesis, give it everything you have, and place your bet.
Now comes judgement day - you release, and wait to see if you got a hit or if you’re about to be engulfed by the sun.
In reality, if you’re resorting to hope then you’re already in a bad starting position. Luck and timing will always play a part, but you can gain confidence by developing a growth strategy so that you aren’t running around panicking on launch day (and in the coming weeks and months) - but instead have a concrete plan to follow, with metrics to hit.
It’s taken roughly 10 months to onboard a little over 100 users, most of them coming on in the last couple of months - but more importantly, it’s taken about 10 months to figure out what I did wrong and how to do better in the future.
These last 3 years have been a crazy experience, and I am deeply grateful for every failure along the way.
I got to connect with Grammy and Oscar winning audio engineers, and engineers at major labels (one in particular has the most mind-boggling credits - Lady Gaga, Michael Jackson, David Bowie, Stevie Wonder, Aerosmith - and the list goes on).
But there were also some absolute, all-enveloping lows at times that are effectively a rite of passage, which were compounded by how big (seemingly) the stakes were - considering that 3 years of my life went into this product.
The takeaways from those failures feel enormous in scope and deeply profound, and I’m grateful for the fact that I got to learn at least some of the rules of the game.