ANTSAND first started as my personal dairy to keep track of my life. At one point in time, I did not wanted to use any Social media sites. I wanted to only use the one I created. I think the creator in me thought, if I can build one, I will build one. Why do I need to use other products. This idea has still not completely grown out of me. For the most part I am vey much a maker.
I have been working on ANTSAND since 2014. Now, there are some years where I have not touched ANTSAND's code base. This meant that ANTSAND till the good part of 2020 was more or less a hobby project. In my mind I wanted it to be a successful product, but my actions were not aligned with my goals. This can happen when a project is not your highest priority. If it is even 2nd on your list, your hobby project will not turn into a product. This is lesson 1. If you want to make it succeed, it has to be the highest priority in your life. Nothing should stand in its way.
This is why ANTSAND never progressed and succedded. It was never the highest priority. I never worked on it with full conviction and tenacity.
What does #1 priority, tenacity and conviction look like? Become an ANIMAL.
It looks like you are an animal. By an animal I mean all you do is walk, talk, sleep, focus, act, act, act, act and think about just one thing. That one thing is your #1 priority. As you can see, I mentioned 'act' couple of times. Because action equals progress. No action, no progress. You get up at 5:00am and get straight to working on your priority #1, you eat food fast so that you do not waste too much time eating and then get back to your priority #1. Nothing, I mean nothing stops you from your priority #1. You do not go to sleep till all the tasks needed to get done for priority #1 is done. You have to become obbssesed. There would need to be a life changing catastrophy for you to pause your priority #1. If you love what you are doing you may not necessarily burn out. If you do, find a way to hack your routine so that you do not burn out. You then optimize your life to get priority #1 done.
This is what was needed for ANTSAND to succeed. And I deifintely was not an animal.
Once your work like an ANIMAL, does not mean success is given. Then next part is are you building something people want
Build something people want
Being an animal is one thing. Building something people want is another. What I did for ANTSAND was not what people wanted. I built it mostly for me. An internal tool, where only I could use it and hope other too would be able to use it. I mostly focused on my needs. Which to be fair is very critical. 1st build something you want. But what I failed to do was to make it easy for others to use it. And this boils down to what is my product? How do I want others to use it? How can I make it easy for others to use it. What ANTSAND is, is nothing new. A tool to build websites. But what diffrentiates ANTSAND? What do users become when they use ANTSAND? What do they achieve when they use ANTSAND? What will make ANTSAND a tool they need and not just want? These are the questions one needs to think deeply about when prioritizing a product.
This is the 2nd reason why ANTSAND did not succeed. I failed to answer these questions.
Sell the innovation not the product
What makes a product like ANTSAND innovative? This is one question I failed to answer properly. To sell ANTSAND, I need to sell it to a particular market. A product like what I have created already exists. But the market that these products cater too is not always well established. Let us take or e.g. any website building software. Who are the focused towards? You can focus your product towards marketers, desginers, entrepreuners, agencies, developers, business owners, etc. These are all well established markets. Most likely there is a tool for these target audience that already exists. So now the question lies, do you make another product for the same market or you redfine the market.
Redefining the market means what we want our customers to associate themself as, when they use such a product. We want then to be productive, faster, create compelling products or services, and most importantly associate massive growth and success when they use a tool like ANTSAND. Our market is for those who rely on digital marketing. Our market is also for those who succeed using digital marketing by publshing a lot of content. We are focusing on a market that believe education marketing is the way to make their business thrive. This is the market we want to sell to.
Digital Marketing -> Education Marketing -> Growth -> Thriving business
Who do we want our customers to become?
We want our customers to love creating and publishing content. We want our customers to associate content equals success. We want our customers to be productive content creators. The goal here is to make them super productive. Our target audience are for both develoeprs and marketers. Making it easy for the develoeprs to create, build and lauch a website. Also making it easy for the marketer to write content and publish content.
Target Audience -> Marketers, Developers, Thought Leaders, Content Creators
Target Goal -> Create, build, deploy, edit Websites super fast, easily and secure (developer stremline)
Create,publish and edit Content super fast and super easy
We want our developer customers to:
Have a sense of ownership.Give them the opportunity to own their code. Have the ability to pull their code out from ANTSAND.
We want our marketing customers to:
Have a sense that content writing is fun, easy and a meanigful use of their time. ANTSAND will help them grow their business.
How do we do it?
This is where ANTSAND does not really live up to the standard. It is a difficult application to use. But most importantly, it is not user friendly. To make ANTSAND succeed every button, interface must be well defined. It must be easy to use. No glitches. People hate glitches. Everything needs to just work. This where ANTSAND fails badly.
It is not a very user intutive software. Everything on the dashboard mut indicate:
Creating, Deploying a website is easy
Creating and deploying content is easy
These are the two outcomes that users must get when they log into the app.
Why build ANTSAND?
ANTSAND will be a very critical tool for business owners and content creators. It is a tool that will be optimized for safety, security and more importantly keep up with the latest web trends automatically. This is what makes ANTSAND special.
We want everyone to use it. Want to scale. We want people to become productive and start creating great content. We want to do this because life is too short and customers at scale demand a freakin well working, well oiled product. There is no point making this a sub-optimal product. It is important to make it scale.