I want to tell you a story. It will show you how your experience in the startup scene is not always reflective of what users want, or think they want.
Two years ago, I was stalking some companies on AngelList related to food tech.
I wanted to collaborate with someone and see if I’d get any perks. Accidentally, I jumped into some company profile from India. They hadn't spent much time on it. Logo, Description, Website Link, and List of founders.
I got curious and jumped on their website to take a look. Nothing "rockstar-ish" or "unicorny": simple pages, default Bootstrap layouts, basic color scheme.
What Is the Catch They didn’t follow design trends. They don’t think about flat design, material design, or Slack copy-cat design. It was just a pretty simple, very 2001st design.
And you can connect your API into it, see some logs, capacity of requests, and few widgets with statistics. Again, nothing fancy. I closed my tab because I was not impressed enough. In a world where you have Swagger by default, Apiary and Postman(and Postwoman), you get bored quickly.
As for me, I’m tired of all these innovations and breakthroughs, so I'm not happy to see a simple project with a small number of features.
Then I got back to their profile. And got struck by the lightning. The "Funding" section caught my eye. I found out that they got some seed money.
Some 12 million.
After that situation, I realized that the more you follow the startup scene, the more your eyes get blind. Ego and experience hurt here. And do I think they deserve it?
Yes, I do. I'm sure they have polished the 5 main features they have and just do their job pretty well.
