Lessons learned from overbuilding a simple web app

In this article I want to share my experience, on what I learned from building a simple web application, and overwhelming it with unnecessary features.

First and foremost, I’m still in college, so not much of a background to show, but I started building applications and it really is a fun process to me. Of course everyone wants to build the next big thing, but in order to do that one has to start by building small, and at the end put those small pieces together.

So, I was building this application where you can save multiple links as one, and then share only that one link, without having to send multiple links to multiple friends, let’s say. The idea is rather simple right? No need to complicate it with bunch of features. Well me being me, I wasn’t satisfied building something that simple, so I started adding more.

After I finished the whole application in less than two days, I wasn’t satisfied because it was not much of a challenge for me. So I thought, why not add something more, just to enhance my skills as a developer. This was the first mistake many of young creators make when they start to build something rather simple.

First question that you need to ask yourself is: Am I building this just so I can enhance my skills, or do I really want this product to be used by lots of people.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that these two cannot co-exist. In fact, building some applications that I thought were simple to create in my head, turned out a lot more difficult than I have imagined, so I needed to dig for resources, but that’s a topic for another post maybe.

What I am trying to say is if you have a finished product that you wanted to build, right before your eyes, and you see that is everything you planned to do, publish it. See what your users say about what could be better and what to exclude, after all you are building something for more than just yourself. That brings it to number two.

Get information on what your users like and dislike about your application. Consult with them about your thoughts on implementing new features.

I started to add unnecessary features that would just slow the users workflow, such as: add a title to this group link, add tags on a link, etc… If you implement a bunch of features, users will get lost in your original idea and what you wanted to build, although it may seem pretty clear to you.

The best way to gain feedback in early stages of development, is to ask a friend or a family member what they think about your product. That will give you the bigger picture.

Trust me you will get bored coming home every day, working on same product, and seeing no real feedback, it feels that you are just doing nothing. If your application is somewhere on the internet, at least you will feel like you accomplished something, even if no one likes it or dislikes it.

Let’s just make one thing clear. I’m not saying you should build half a product and publish it by all means. No. If you have a large project in mind, go and work on it for 1 month, 2 months, or even a year. I’m just saying after you have a functional application, and you know it has some purpose, don’t waste any more time working on new features, you can easily implement them later.

The application that I was talking about in this article will be online soon, (in process of buying domain and setting it up) so I will update this article.

Feel free to share your thoughts on this topic, you can follow me on twitter for future updates.

Thank you for reading!

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