Hi HN,

I started this newsletter almost two years ago a side project. I’m fascinated by how products evolve to meet the needs of their customers. So much of startup and tech culture is focused on celebrating launch day. We often forget about all of the hard work that goes into iterating the product after launch to find the proverbial product market fit and sustainable growth. The year following a launch is usually quite challenging, and most products don’t go gangbusters with exponential growth. Instead there are countless tweaks, features developed then abandoned, marketing techniques tested, and long nights spent stressed about the future.

This newsletter is dedicated to that first year.

I've done 31 interviews and have some good ones lined up for the start of 2023. Hope you find them useful. You can read the full archive here: https://www.readoneyearwiser.com/posts

I started this newsletter in March of last year. So far, I've done about 20 interviews. You can find all of them here: https://www.readoneyearwiser.com/posts

I decided to start the newsletter because so much of startup and tech culture is focused on celebrating launch day, but the hard part comes after launch!

Let me know what you think.

Hey All - I've started to interview founders and product makers one year after their product launch to hear about their journey and what they've learned along the way. A lot of tech focuses on product launches and I think the hard part comes after launching when you are struggling to find product market fit and grow.

For my newsletter, I recently spoke to Phil Libin about his video startup, mmhmm. Let me know what you think.

I recently interviewed the co-founder and CEO of Fairstream, a virtual events platform that helps companies recruit and hire candidates from diverse communities.

Some good insights on being a founder, but I especially liked when he walked me through how they realized that the first iteration of the product wasn’t the best one and how after their virtual career fair concept went viral they only had 3 weeks to put the event together.

I really like the layout and think this would be super helpful. Obviously it will provide more value once the community grows and their are more upvotes. So far all the categories I looked at all had 0 votes.

One thing you may want to try out in the early days to make it look like there is more activity is to create a bunch of different logins for yourself and friends. Reddit had a super admin tool that allowed them to select from a "user" dropdown anytime the founders wanted to post a comment. That way it appeared there was a lot more dialog and activity.

Thanks for your feedback:)

Looks like a great product! I like that you are making group travel easier and helping people hash out the details and vote.

One bit of feedback. I found it very challenging to scroll down you landing page (Chrome on Macbook). The page doesn't scroll at first and then quickly jumps to the next section, but then it kept going and was really sensitive. Then it was challenging to scroll back up to the next section.

Glad you liked it! We are making a few tweaks and hope to deploy an improved version in the coming days!

I built an app a few years ago that does this for bars. Bar Roulette. It's free in the app store...give it a try. I've had a lot of fun using. http://barroulette.cool/

As someone trying to build my own apps, I really enjoyed your write-up on how you grew Habit Streaks.

Thank you, I appreciate that!

A brief, but interesting post on how viral products are simple and can be easily described in one sentence.

>The format of both descriptions is the same: “You do X and Y happens.” X is the input and Y is the output. This input-output pair matches our intuition about how software works. Simplifying the product as a straightforward input and desirable output creates the sense that it’s an ingenious idea.

I think it's important to have a simple product and using a feature to explain it makes sense. However, this brought to mind the sales and marketing idea that it's better to sell benefits, not features. I'm not sure where I sit on which approach is better, I suppose they each have their purpose. I definitely find myself pitching my side projects based on the feature, not the benefit :)

I think you can use both:

Start with the lead feature, so that the potential customer has a simple idea to kick around in their head.

Then, describe the benefits, giving them a fuller story for why they should use the product.

What did you find interesting about it? How does it compare to Optimizely?