[Startup Anti-Vision] - Why I Think Nobody will Ever Use my Product

Users wouldn’t use my projects, because … there a lot of reasons.

So let’s call it A Startup Anti-Vision. because I don’t really understand that “startups vision-mission” thing.

First of all - don’t make this mistake: Don’t think, that anyone will use your product.

That all-world population or the whole market will be your users.

It’s your brain, trying to fool you. Ohh, thank you Brainie for this…

Science behind this article calls it - “False consensus effect”.

Read more at Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect

I find this very interesting though.

I’m proposing to other owners or wannabe-trepreneurs to play this mind game.

You just need to list why nobody will use your product. Like I did it below.

It’s a bit painful but important. An owner must be pessimistic.

A lot of peoples cannot handle this, so… maybe… you will close this article?

I’m building a few projects, so I’ll need to play in this game a few times.

We’re trying to kill optimism for ChickenKyiv project(meal planning tool). 
Some information about this project you can find here.

So, why a lot of users wouldn’t use project, that I’m working on

1) They wouldn’t find us. They don’t know about my project. This problem is partly related to growth and marketing. (this is why I wrote an article at HackerNoon)

2) My functionality is limited. (Because I’m too lazy to build a complex project from start)

3) Heavy-weighted project. It works badly with mobile devices at this moment(we should make it better)

4) Design with bad UI (lazy, but right now I getting help from designers and frontend developers)

5) SEO. I set up SEO for my clients, but for now, I think this is not a necessity at current project stage

6) High/low prices — we should “play” with prices, then we’ll understand how much users want to pay for our services.

7) Low customer retention rate. I plan to have it low from the start because it’s an art — manipulate with this numbers. Right now it’s easy to increase user registrations, rather than make them pay > 12 months in a row

8) Users can use similar projects and don’t want to make a transition

9) 80% of users, that will purchase our services, will be gone after 1 year of using this service.

10) Bad support. Create a stunning support system is hard. Hope Intercom will help us, but we cannot use it in first stages. If project will grow — we should have at least 1–2 people that can cover 12 hours of ongoing support per day. It should be English native employee, maybe US citizen, because of timezone issues.

11) Bugs and other problems, related to the development process

12) Hire not experienced developers(less than 10 years of experience)

13) Create a bad project architecture and raise a technical debt into the sky

15) Servers, hosting, uptime (environment stuff).

I’m just a developer, without a lot of knowledge about cooking (I can boil an egg, make a soup, or order pizza).

But I cannot create a unique recipe-based content. And I’m not 100% clear about knowledge of cooking. So I can create a page, a block, but not a recipe.

I don’t have “special feeling” about cooking. it’s bad.

16) Right now parts of the project are separated. So the functionality is really limited. I hope this will reduce the number of users too. People want to go to someplace -> see good products -> see a price tag and buy it -> like a standalone solution. This is not about my current project.

17) This project cannot disrupt. There are no innovations at this moment. A lot of projects with similar functionality are presented on the Web.

18) There can be a possibility to have conflicts to work with other programming languages or different platforms.

18) I don’t have a lot of connections with the US, where I plan to promote my project. I don’t have a mentor, that have an experience in the similar field

19) Let’s assume that this project will start to grow and will get first users. It’ll grow slow. And wouldn’t grow 10x of sales with next 6 months.

Please tell me what do you think in comments below.
Hope you’ll try this method with your product too.