Why it's easier than ever to build an app but harder than ever to make it successful

Product Hunt Radio

Two active makers in the Product Hunt community join Ryan at AngelList in San Francisco for this week's episode of Product Hunt Radio.

Hiten Shah was recently awarded Product Hunt Community Member of the year. While that's the honor of a lifetime, he's also accomplished much more than that. He co-founded a few SaaS companies over the years, including KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg (which is still going strong after 13 years). He's now working on FYI, a tool that makes it super easy to find your documents in a few clicks.

Marie Prokopets is also a co-founder at FYI. Prior to jumping into the tech scene she was Director at Diageo, a spirit and wine company, and worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

In this episode we talk about:

• How Marie and Hiten built FYI. They talk about the challenges they faced in their product development process and how they've learned from them.
• Marie's transition from working in a big company (where she occasionally rode on private jets) to founder of a startup.
• The story of the MVP they built in just five days, and the tools they use to gather feedback from users.

We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to AngelList, FreshBooks and Bubble for their support. 😸

Quotes from This Episode

“If you want to get a few users using your product, that’s easy. Getting tons of usage or high retention takes a lot of work. Nail your product and then scale it is my new mantra these days.” — Hiten

“We discovered we were solving the wrong problem and there was a completely different problem that we had the opportunity to solve. Sometimes you make mistakes but the really important thing is what did you learn from that?” — Marie

“When I started, it was much easier to build something, launch it and get a whole bunch of users. Now it’s easier than ever to put something out — it’s harder than ever to make it work.” — Hiten

Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode

Airtable — Realtime spreadsheet-database hybrid.

Bear — A beautiful, flexible writing app for notes and prose.

Coda — It's a new day for docs.

Confluence — An open and shared workspace for teams.

FYI — Find your documents, like magic.

Glide — Create mobile apps from Google Sheets.

Meadow — On-demand medical marijuana delivery.

Notion — Increase your team intelligence.

OneTab — Save memory by converting all your open tabs into a list.

Periscope — 150X faster data analysis.

Quip — Beautiful documents on any device.

Vesper (RIP) — An elegant way to record your thoughts.

Zapier — Connect and automate 500+ web apps.