30 lessons we’ve learned building software products

August 11, 2026

Correctify Team

Strive to make your product so simple that instructions are unnecessary.
Helping users experience the full power of your product within 30 seconds of signing up is the best way to retain them.
When starting out, a blank canvas or empty dashboard can feel intimidating as there are too many paths users can take. Instead, guide them towards your most valuable action. In our case, users used to land in an empty document after signing up which made things confusing. We then introduced an onboarding flow which took users through a series of clear steps: a) add content, b) choose design settings, c) get a design within minutes. This increased the % of new users who ended up creating designs from 19% to 52% overnight.
Customer support is sales so try to wow your customers during their first interaction. In the very early stages of Correctify, when a customer got an error, we used to contact him immediately instead of waiting for a support ticket. It was something most had never experienced before so it immediately won them over.
Talk to your users often and watch them use your product.
Users will use your product in ways you have never imagined. The only way to find out is to ship something out to the world and watch.
Screen recording software like Hotjar or Mixpanel Recordings is one of the best ways to find out how customers use your platform and to identify and replicate bugs.
Prioritization is the single most important thing in product development. The right feature can completely alter the trajectory of your company. If it doesn’t help you a) bring more customers or b) deter existing customers from churning, then it’s a feature for later. You should always be asking yourself, what is the single most important thing I should be working on right now?
Aside from the obvious benefits, every new feature has a lot of downsides. More features mean more software to test, debug, maintain, improve, sell, and explain how it works. More isn’t always better.
A feature can be completed in 1 day or 3 months. If you want to ship fast, you must learn to leave non-essentials out.
Especially when small, ship a feature in V1 but already have in mind what V5 will look like. V1 doesn’t have to be polished, it just has to exist. If your customers like it, you can always improve it later on. Spending months building a feature nobody wants is an expensive mistake.
All decision making should be based on data, so try to measure everything (16 Startup Metrics).
To create a great product, you must first learn what greatness looks like. Sign up to 100 of the best software products out there, test them extensively and pay attention to all the small details and interactions.
Your landing page is one of your most important assets. First impressions matter. Within 10 seconds of visiting your page, a prospect should clearly know what your product does. Use very simple language and lots of screenshots.
External communication should be dead simple, specific and vivid. Vague words like streamline, efficiency, and strategy are deadly sins. Why say ‘’streamline your creative pipeline’’ when you can say ‘’hire a designer for €0.40 per day’’?
Marketing is persuasion. For an ad to work, you have to articulate clearly and in a trusting way why your product is superior to everything else around. 99% of ads out there are informational: ''I have this thing whoever wants it''. To sell you have to persuade by evoking emotion cause that's how people decide.
Blogging is a good way to attract free users but it’s a long-term commitment. To get the most out of it you must produce well-written and valuable pieces of content plus ensure your website has a lot of backlinks, thus high domain authority to rank in the first positions of search engine results.
Internal communication should be primarily asynchronous. Great work requires long stretches of uninterrupted time.
Overcommunicate, overcommunicate, overcommunicate.
If you don’t read The Mom Test before you start talking to potential customers, you will probably end up with a completely flawed view of reality.
When doing research, you should keep talking to potential customers until you stop hearing new stuff but you should speak with at least 100 to ensure a representative sample.
No one arrives at innovation or success by planning everything out. You just keep experimenting until something works.
All meetings should have meeting notes with clear action items per person.
Google Search Ads is the highest-converting form of paid advertising and significantly cheap in low-competition countries.
Almost no one nails pricing right the first time, so treat it as an experiment. There are many pricing strategies, all with significant benefits and trade-offs.
Good software needs regular periods of maintenance. If you keep adding features without investing in maintenance, technical debt and complexity will accumulate, eventually creating chaos and slowing down your team’s velocity.
Your tech stack rarely matters. Pick whatever you feel more confident with.
Invest time in educating your users.
Be willing to change your mind if new data contradicts your current beliefs.
‘’It’s a torturous chaos until it isn’t’’