- Steven Cravotta
- Posts
- The first step of building a $1M app
The first step of building a $1M app
Hey there,
Nowadays it's easy to open Rork and build an app just by prompting.
That's also why many founders ship a mess.
Skip the doc and you build whatever feels fun that day. A feature here, half a paywall there, no idea who the app is for.
Before I build a new app, I open a document and dump my thoughts.
For Posted, I sat down and wrote a 20-page document about everything.
What is the core idea?
Which flows do I want?
First paywall ideas, onboarding screens.
Everything I researched about the user I was building for.
I dumped everything into that doc.
When I built the app I used maybe 10% of it.
But that 10% was everything.
Because writing all 20 pages told me which 10% actually mattered.
The doc forced me to see the whole thing at once.
Every feature, every flow, every monetization idea, all of it on the page where I couldn't lie to myself about what the app needed.
Once it was out, the MVP got obvious. Three or four things doing one job well.
From there the doc became my map.
Every time I sat down to build, I knew exactly what I was building and what I was ignoring.
That clarity is why Posted scaled to $1M in revenue in its first year.
So before you start building, dump your thoughts into a doc.
Dump every feature, every screen, every flow, every monetization idea, every user you can think of.
Get it all out.
Then read it back and circle the three things the app cannot launch without.
That's your MVP. The rest is your map for later.
Planning before you build is the difference between a mess and a million-dollar app.
Peace,
Steven