Lessons from Spread

For 2.5 months, Gilad and I worked incredibly hard to build Spread, a search engine built into your spreadsheet. Imagine you are in Excel, and you type in "apartments in New York under $2,000/month." The rows and columns in front of you would get populated with search results.

We didn't get into YC. But we learned an incredibly valuable lesson that applies to all aspiring entrepreneurs out there: find a use case.

When we showed our product, most people said it was 'cool' and congratulated us for the technical feat. Unfortunately, no one would use it. If you want to start a company, don't build a product if you won't use it, or if you haven't spoken with anyone who said they would.

As an engineer, it is easy to stay at home writing software you think is 'cool' and useful to some hypothetical client out there.

That's not how it works. You need to be calling, emailing, meeting, speaking with people in different industries all the time. Ask them what they need and how technology can make their lives better.

Gilad and I have certainly been doing this, and it has been a very rewarding source of ideas and inspiration.

Mimoun, April 26, 2014