1/ @usefyi launches on @ProductHunt today, producthunt.com/posts/fyi and here's more about the journey (and pivots) @MarieProkopets and I went through before we got to FYI.
2/ About two years ago, my co-founder @MarieProkopets and I got really interested in fundraising. We were talking about fundraising to companies all the time and giving them advice about how to raise money. I had more requests for fundraising conversations than ever before.
3/ We thought there must be a problem for us to solve in the fundraising market, so we dug in with research. A single tweet led to us interviewing 37 people, all of whom had serious challenges with fundraising We thought we had discovered a huge problem!
4/ We heard a few painful problems that led to what we ended up building. Fundraising takes up a lot of time. Most people lack knowledge about the fundraising process. Many pitch decks are built from templates that are more than a decade old. Most people fail at raising money.
5/ As soon as we felt we’d done enough research, we started building @getdogo, a tool that lets founders get feedback on their pitch decks and share them with investors. Here’s what the early version of dogo looked like. 
6/ In just a few weeks, we had hundreds of customers using @getdogo to get feedback on their pitch decks and share their decks with investors. People told us how critical dogo was while they were raising money. But we never launched and it’s not because we couldn’t find users.
7/ The fundraising market is quite large. There were 5,948 US VC deals closed in 2017 says @PitchBook. Global funding was over $164B across 11,042 deals in 2017 says @CBinsights. Each successful fundraise means there were 100s of companies that wanted to be funded but weren’t.
8/ We noticed subtle problems with @getdogo. People weren’t willing to pay, companies went radio silent after raising their round or failing to, we had trouble getting the perfect set of features that got everyone excited. Something felt off. We weren’t sure about the root cause.
9/ The biggest problem founders have is pitching investors and raising money. The pitch deck problem just wasn’t enough. We misjudged the market. We didn’t realize it at the time but we made a classic startup mistake. We stopped working on dogo without realizing our mistake.
10/ We decided to pivot anyway. That’s when I came up with an idea to copy and paste our code. My team still makes fun of me for this. We took what we learned from dogo and repackaged it into a new product called @getdraftsend.
11/ We had learned during dogo customer interviews that people wanted to add their voice to presentations, so we decided to make that a core feature of Draftsend. With Draftsend people could share PDFs and see what recipients did, plus they could add audio to those PDFs.
12/ There were many companies in the space like @DocSend and @ClearSlide. We had an innovative approach that focused on audio. Not once did we think about the market, nor did we think about the slew of document sharing competitors who were being sold or closed down.
13/ We were so intently focused on our innovative idea. We thought we were bulletproof thanks to the novelty of adding audio to PDFs. At first, it seemed like our ingenuity and copy-and-paste strategy paid off. We had over 2,000 people subscribe to our @ProductHunt Upcoming page.
14/ People were tweeting about us like crazy! And when we launched on @ProductHunt, we had over 1,700 upvotes, over 130 comments, plus loads of reviews of the product. We were the #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt. producthunt.com/posts/draftsend
15/ But the buzz quickly faded. The idea was novel and fun, yes. But we had fallen into the same trap as we did on @getdogo. With dogo and @getdraftsend, we assumed we were targeting giant markets. But we never took the time to actually think about it deeply.
16/ We failed to ask ourselves questions that might change our approach. Questions like:
Who will pay for the product?
How many customers need this product?
Is the market currently growing?
Which segments of the market are growing the fastest?
Will this market grow in the future?
Who will pay for the product?
How many customers need this product?
Is the market currently growing?
Which segments of the market are growing the fastest?
Will this market grow in the future?
17/ We were blinded by the problems we had discovered. We didn’t take a step back to actually think about the market and the opportunity we were heading into. With @getdogo, we created a product that was episodic and in a small market category where people could not pay for it.
18/ With @getdraftsend, though the idea is innovative, the presentation sharing market is actually quite small. We thought that by adding audio we’d be sitting in the video market, but people had too many feature expectations for us to compete with video software.
19/ Making this mistake once was painful. But twice… even worse. But these mistakes are what led @MarieProkopets and I to FYI. We learned so much about the document market through our failures. We’ve applied all those learnings to building @usefyi producthunt.com/posts/fyi
