What are some of the worst early stage mistakes you made while building your product?

I think my biggest mistake was not actually going for a true MVP and deploying that earlier, which would've led to attaining very key user feedback. Instead we waited for a more polished app before launching it, which delayed some useful user input which we believe are game changers.

Not defining the MVP well enough. I tried to build a version of Pokémon go 3 years before the game came out. I had the team, investment, the idea and a lot of people interested but I could never settle for the features for the mvp. So I leaned a valuable lesson, focus, planning and compromise are more important features to me now.

Not talking to anyone before building, and imagining MVP features needed based on what I *thought* was crucial for the product, not what users were looking for. If you do this, you will create a mess for your future self.

to skip a discovery phase it was a fail

Some of the mistakes that we made while building our flagship product were: 1. Heavily bent on over-optimization 2. Lack of early feedback loop 3. Not focusing on a specific set of features for the first release We wasted tons of time in optimizing our Saas product for every small flow and feature. It got delayed for more than 2 months. When the product was released, it still had so many issues that we had to take it off the website for some time. We worked with our first client's feedback using !Qualaroo to optimize the product, which took another month or so. In fact, we had to do some customizations for him for free (out of courtesy), even adding the features that were not initially planned. It would have been better to release a decent MVP product with fixed features and functionalities. We could have incorporated an early feedback loop like surveys or feedback forms to take suggestions from the clients and improved the product. It was a great learning experience for future developments. Hope this helps.