Overcoming years of mindless building to finally making my first successful product

Now 7 months since I started VR Anime Society, I wanted to look back at my journey so far and share it with all of you.

Since finishing university, I’ve always been building side projects. I would spend most of my free time on building some crazy idea that came into my head, hoping to eventually hit the gold mine and make that project my full-time job.

But I’ve realised that I wasn’t consistent. I always had ideas and would start to tinker with one, making some great progress, until some other idea would pop up that would seem more interesting, instead of finishing the previous project. That resulted in a dozen private git repositories with some interesting ideas that never saw the light of day.

Humble Beginnings

Funny enough it was the same for this product as well. I was working on Sensuu, Natural Language Calculator, which I thought had great potential. I told myself — “This is the project you have to finish, no distractions on other ideas”. It was supposed to be a simple app, but I underestimated the complexity of the project and ended up working on it for over a year. It has seen only a handful of users, which were all my friends. It was taking a toll on my sanity, so I was taking frequent breaks from development. In a nutshell, I was stuck with an “almost finished” app.

At the same time, I stumbled upon a particular group called Anime Viewing Society. It was a couple dozen people Discord server dedicated to watching anime in VR using a fantastic app called

. It was an interesting concept and I quickly started to become active on the server, organising the events and optimising the way things run. It didn’t take long until I became an admin and started to really spice things up on the server.

It took my mind off Sensuu and I was having a lot of fun, both organising and actually participating in the events. And then I made a post on r/vive, which blew up and brought in around 200 users to our server.

This is where I felt like there was a bigger potential in this whole endeavour. There were over 200 active users on our Discord, I was organising multiple streaming sessions a week and it felt like I was only scratching the surface.

So I decided to put Sensuu on hold. I felt bad that even after committing to finishing this project, I had to repeat the cycle. But I couldn’t ignore the opportunity and I wanted to strike the iron while it was still hot.

The MVP

All this time, the organisation was done through Discord, mainly with the help of a popular scheduling Discord bot — Saber. It worked but was extremely limiting, especially with the growing user base. So I took 1 week off work and decided to set up the website with just the landing page as a start. While I worked like hell, it still took closer to 2 weeks, but I wanted to make it just right. Looking back at it, I could have shipped in one week, as I made a re-design of the landing page early on anyway.

It was both scary and exciting to announce that the website was now available. I knew that there were over 200 people that would start using it actively, which was a first for me.

The launch went smoothly (it was just a landing page after all) and people were impressed by a quick MVP I did, which gave me more motivation to continue working. I also posted to Reddit r/vive and r/oculus subreddits at the time, not expecting much attention, but to my surprise, they ended up in top 5.

Functional Website

With landing page out of the way, it was time to build actual functionality. The most crucial feature was, of course, to let people RSVP for our events on the website, instead of using Discord server bot. That meant building a lot of functionality, from user registration to event management.

That took me more time of course, but having users that could let me test the design and functionality every day, I felt like I was building a product for a real audience, something that I only experienced in full-time occupation. It was a stark difference to how I built products before — alone and depressed, writing code for months with no feedback, never knowing if what I am doing actually matters.

Breakup

But it wasn’t always smooth sailing. As I’ve originally mentioned, I wasn’t the one who created the community. Discord server has been created by a different person, who was generally off-hands everything that was going on. Which made it easy for me to go all out and grow the community.

But as my ambitions grew, his dissatisfaction with my approaches also grew. When I started making the website, I’ve started talking about how huge is the opportunity here. I also started to suggest where I think the society should go, but he had a different opinion: keeping the community small and not adding many features to the website.

As I continued to develop the website and with the increasing number of people excited about the new direction, I was sure he’ll see the potential and change his mind.

But alas, that didn’t change. When I finished the website’s events page and got around half of our users to register on the website, I knew a decision had to be made. I couldn’t continue investing so much time and effort into this endeavour, when someone else, akin to a co-founder at startup, could nullify all of my hard work.

So I made a proposal to take up the helm of the Discord server and handle the whole community, while he would still retain admin privileges and have a say in the future decisions, while the final say would still be up to me. But that didn’t come to pass as I was immediately banned from the server. It was done in the name of “minimising potential malicious actions from me”, which was understandable, although felt a bit extreme.

It was a tough decision, but one that had to be done. I had to let go of all the hard-earned users, over 250 at the time, which was the biggest userbase I’ve ever had.

VR Anime Society

A name change and a new Discord server later, VR Anime Society was born. I was not bound by external parties anymore and could start planning months in advance and explore more interesting opportunities.

It took me only two months to reach the same userbase as before, versus around 6 months originally. And with Google Analytics at hand, I was extremely excited to see the biggest traffic to date across all the different projects I’ve ever done.

There are plenty of other products that make these numbers, monthly. But being in a niche inside a niche, which is anime VR, I am very pleased with current traffic. Especially it being mostly word of a mouth as I haven’t been aggressively concentrating on user acquisition.

Biggest lesson learned so far

This journey is just starting, but there have been a wealth of new insights already. The biggest lesson to take away, and you’ve probably read this on every other blog out there:

Until you ship to real users, you are just indulging in a hobby. Ship to users as soon as possible if instead, you want to be working on a product.

I’ve started and abandoned so many projects, mainly because I never shipped to users, except my friends. The moment people you’ve never met start using what you’ve made, the game changes completely. It keeps you motivated, you get feedback and most importantly — you provide value to people all around the world.