5 Things I Learned While Doing My First Startup (as a software developer)

6 min readMay 25, 2022

Last week I finished my first SaaS startup Beeeper. After five months of ups and downs, I decided to share my 5 tips or lessons I learned from this undertaking.

Prerequisite

This was my first startup meaning I did everything by myself as a solo developer. I had a lot of prior experience working with various products. It’s not like I jumped into doing things without knowing stuff. As of the time of writing this article I spent 7 years playing for team devs.

I started working on Beeeper exactly on January 1st, 2022 and to be honest, almost all 5 tips were known to me before I started — I’ve just chosen to ignore them somehow, like most the people. I am writing this to emphasize how important they are.

10 words about the product #not_an_AD

Beeeper is a communication tool designed to help clients notify workers about things. I say things on purpose because business owners can define what kind of notifications their employees can receive. Everything is based around QR codes combined with push notifications.

1. Finish the MVP (most viable product) FIRST!

Don’t create a full-fledge piece of software at first. I know you can, but at the very beginning, it will all probably go to waste.

My mistake, as probably most of the developers want to break from their usual 9–5, was that I’ve started to work on Beeeper as it was already a living product with paying customers…

I’ve implemented an admin panel for imaginary people — in my mind they needed it 😆

This resulted in being stuck for weeks doing stuff that didn’t add any value to the product.

ADVICE: Do an MVP — just the bare minimum. Create a landing page (even using Notion for staters) and ask people what they think about your product. I can’t believe it’s that simple and I still messed this up 😆