We spent 10 months building a product, scrapped it, built a new product in 3 weeks and helped an Independent artist raise $1000 in one day

I started working on https://dimensionapp.xyz with two friends in January of this year.

We spent nights and weekends shipping features for months. We wanted to launch with tons of features to make our platform enticing to creators and supporters.

Some of the features we designed and built out included:

• a chat feature
• direct message feature
• web3 authentication
• email authentication
• NFT token gating
• One-time purchasing
• subscription purchasing
• social media posting functionality

...all before we solicited feedback or validated our idea.

This process led to months of building with no feedback, subpar features and burnout.

One day we all met and agreed that we've been building for months; we're burnt out and have a product with a bunch of unfinished features that we're not sure people would even use... if we ever launch.

After spending some time debating if we should just scrap the project that we spent all of our free time building for the past few months, we decided that we wanted to launch with one completely finished feature and validate that feature with real users.

We got the idea to stop over-engineering from levels.io and his Makebook (https://readmake.com/). Pieter Levels repeatedly stresses two points:

1. Launch your product as fast as humanely possible because the best feedback you can get is from real users using your product.
2. Talk to as many users as possible while building so that you aren't trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

We decided to put all of our focus on one feature: proof of creator support.

This idea may sound crazy, but we were very confident about this idea for several reasons:

1. Supporters are very passionate about supporting their favorite creators, and they want to make it known
2. Supporters love to say they supported an artist early on in their career but there's no way to prove that
3. Supporters want recognition from their favorite creators
4. Creators need new ways to monetize and have traditionally received the short end of the stick on existing platforms

We created a platform to allow creators to set up a public page to allow their supporters to donate money in exchange for perks offered by an artist (digital collectables, merch, discounts).

In addition, this platform doubled as public proof of the exact date a supporter chose to support an artist publically, how many social media followers the artist had at the time of support and the order in which the user decided to support compared to other supporters.

We raised $1000 with our first artist on our first day, funded purely by passionate supporters. Now that we've found there is real-world interest from artists and supporters, we plan to add features incrementally and onboard the many artists interested in using our Dimension.

We spent ten months building a product we never launched or solicited feedback for, but those mistakes we made will never be repeated, and we hope you do not make these same mistakes.

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman once said, "If You're Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late."

I urge you to talk to users and ship your product as fast as possible.