I burned $250K in 8 months on a product because I trusted secondhand feedback instead of talking to users myself.
My co-founder ran the conversations. I built off what he told me. Every call changed the plan. Eight months and a quarter million dollars later, we had nothing. The shut the company down in 2022.
This week, Wyatt Feaster joined me on the livestream to talk through how he's avoided doing the same.
10 years as a product designer, bouncing between Fortune 500s, startups, and contract work, before going out on his own to run a studio and build his own products full-time. 3 shipped so far. BlockWalk, an app that blocks your distracting apps until you hit your step goal, is the one he's building in public right now.
We went deep on 3 things:
1. Launching as a designer
Wyatt's question when he's picking what to build:
"Why isn't someone doing it this way?"
He finds something already working, then adds his own spin, targets a different audience, or improves one part of it.
He says no idea is fully original anymore.
He also flagged something that most builders got through:
The first launch gives you a rush, that "holy shit, this is amazing" feeling, and it carries you.
The second time, the novelty's gone. You're not chasing the same high anymore.
If you don't actually care about the space you're building in, it gets a lot harder to keep going once that initial excitement wears off.
2. Mistakes made (and what he'd never repeat)
Wyatt dropped a bar:
"First-time founders obsess about the product. Second-time founders obsess about distribution.”
He spent $30,000 having a dev agency build his first app, Hound. Kept adding features because building was fun, not because users asked for them.
Maintenance alone hit $600 a month, and AI costs scaled with every user added right as GPT pricing was at its most expensive.
He ran the numbers, realised it would never work financially, and shut it down. Then deleted the codebase. Three people asked to buy it days later 🤦♂️
Wyatt's advice: get it to "work and do the thing" fast, then stop. High polish this early is almost wasted effort, because you don't know who you're targeting yet and the product is about to change anyway.
Spend the saved time on reps: getting the thing in front of people, not making it prettier for nobody.
3. What 100% on marketing actually look like
Wyatt went full on beast mode:
For BlockWalk's first 3 months, Wyatt ran 4 fresh social accounts (Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram) and posted 10 times a day, on purpose, to find what resonated without an old account's history skewing the results.
BUT, one cold email did more than 3 months of daily posting.
A potential partnership with EOS, a fitness app with 2 million users. BlockWalk could now be sitting inside their in-app offers with a revenue share attached.
The advice from a sales contact that reframed it for him:
A small percentage of a lot beats a big percentage of nothing.
Giving up 50% of 10,000 seats still beats keeping 100% of 3 sales, right? That maths is obvious to nod along to, but much harder to go through within early negotiations.
What Wyatt said that stuck with me:
"Get the hell out of your own way."
A simple 8 words. Summing up the whole episode.
Follow Wyatt's YouTube as he's documenting BlockWalk's build in public journey, an upcoming video of 0 to 90 days of 100% marketing as a design founder.
We also went deep on gut vs data when your sample size is too small to trust, why timing can matter more than the idea itself, and why he thinks every business runs through email marketing eventually.
Watch the full livestream ↓
