Over the past five years, I have been continuously creating. However, as a "wild style" creator, I have made many mistakes and gained a lot of experience.

If you, like me, want to create something and extend your life, this article may provide you with some inspiration.

If your goal is purely to "make money," then this article may not be suitable for you.

These experiences come from my real-life encounters, and I hope they inspire and help you.

Reflections on Products

Here are specific lessons learned from products, the kind of regret that goes, "If I had known, I should have done XX."

Mono Card

This product is quite complex and has many painful lessons.

At the beginning, I did not think through its "positioning" at all; I just wanted to create a "toy" that "grabs link content and generates cards." Although it gained some popularity initially, it was purely due to a sense of "fun" and "playfulness," without addressing real market needs.

This also led to a misnamed product; it was initially called DrawLink, and it took me three months to realize the demand positioning was incorrect, so I changed it to Mono Card.

Experience link: https://mono.cards/

FlowFerry

The product form of FlowFerry is actually quite simple and clear, but the mistakes mainly occurred in "user growth."

I consistently underestimated the importance of the "invitation rebate" feature, which resulted in very slow user growth even though the product was relatively mature.

Additionally, I have been lazy regarding payments and discounts, heavily relying on invitation codes (i.e., conducting activities by distributing free invitation codes), which led to almost no IAP activities being launched, causing me to miss many growth opportunities.

ClipMemo

My biggest mistake was underestimating the potential of ClipMemo.

For over two years since its launch, I have intermittently received inquiries from users asking if it would be updated. During the initial promotion, many users privately expressed their gratitude.

However, because this product did not meet my own needs (i.e., I created it, but I couldn't use it), I lacked the motivation to update it.

Personal Reflections

Before college, I trusted my family's advice and bought a PC instead of a Mac, which directly delayed my joining the Apple Developer Program by a year and caused me to miss many opportunities.

General Experiences

• Not everyone uses Chrome; pay special attention to users who use Safari. Safari has some unique styling features and security policies that can significantly impact product functionality.
• A rough start is often the best start; the hardest part is to keep going.
• After a few years of persistence, you will find that many of your competitors who once ran alongside you have given up.
• Do not fear days of idleness, lack of inspiration, or seeming leisure; it is during these times that the moment of inspiration often emerges. Take the time to truly experience the world and live well.
• The goal of a product is not to make users fall in love with the product, but to help them fall in love with themselves. The killer feature for product growth is always word-of-mouth, which arises from users' appreciation of themselves.
• Technology is not a barrier; delivery is. I have seen many people I would call "poor programmers" who can easily create a so-called "product," but they often do not understand how to transition a product from the IDE to the user's desktop.
• Taste is your moat. You can shake off a large number of people through a well-established delivery chain, but in the end, that top 1% is all about taste.
• In UI design, good design is often unnoticed by (general) users because it aligns with intuition. In contrast, bad design is easily recognized.
• If you are doing this part-time, do not be overly anxious; let it grow naturally. You must acknowledge that you cannot do everything well at the same time. Sometimes, "imperfection" can also be a form of beauty.
• Maintain the mindset of creating works: you are not always succeeding or getting what you want. In other days, Build Your Characters.
• Adding features is easy; subtracting them is hard. Learn to maintain restraint; you can always add new things to the product, but learning what not to add or what to remove is the most valuable.
• People really do check their emails, even spam.
• For content-based products, email subscriptions are crucial.
• Rather than "having AI redo the product," I prefer "redoing it with better UX and superior taste, using AI to accelerate the process."
• If the product is content-oriented, it must be evergreen, not a short-term hit; time will prove everything.

Conclusion

You might be curious: what do I think I did right?

Actually, I only did one thing right: I started doing it and then persisted.