What kind of product do you have? My main feedback is to find a handful (5-10) possible places to promote your product where your audience really lives. This could be writing a guest post on a targeted blog, announcing your product on a Facebook/reddit/Slack group where your theoretical users live, etc. You want to get a handful of passionate users as quickly as possible. This will not only create some great evangelists for your brand, but will also let you hone in on what your ideal users really care about in your product. From there, you can fix any problems and dive deeper into marketing to those audiences.

Good question. Honestly, it's getting buried too deep in development of the product that you don't stop to think whether what you're building is something people actually want. When you have an idea you're excited about, it's easy to just say "Let's go!" and spend months building it. But the really great founders have an idea, and then spend lots of time talking to the people they think might be interested in that idea. You get a massive amount of insight and when you do finally start to actually build it, you will have much more real research from potential users about the actual problems they need solved rather than just the initial "awesome" idea you had. :-)

Good question. We generally try to be analytical and qualitative while building and launching new products. The Portfolio Starter Kit is a recent example. We built it based on a very clear need we saw after reviewing the feedback from hundreds of mentor sessions we hosted.

Designers most commonly talked about their portfolios yet there was a gap in the market for products that actually taught how to create portfolios. Based on this, we surveyed several dozen aspiring designers AND hiring managers to figure out what a "great junior design portfolio" would include. From there we spent a few months creating the ultimate portfolio toolkit, full of projects, resources, and guides.

Once we launched it, we started measuring user feedback as well as the types of projects users were actually creating with the new product. We used this to inform what resources we've been adding to the kit in the last month or two. :-)

Good question! We launched RookieUp in February with the goal of making it easy for aspiring creatives to chat with mentors. I was teaching myself to code 2 years ago and kept having difficult connecting with really strong mentors in coding and design fields.

Since then, hundreds of students have used RookieUp, and we've carefully listened to the main problems many new designers face as they look for their first jobs. We've learned that, while there are a vast number of amazing ways to learn design fundamentals online, most students graduate from those programs with portfolios that still aren't quite personalized or comprehensive enough to stand out to employers. Unlike other bootcamps, ours are focused on helping new designers build up great portfolios *after* they've already started learning the fundamentals. Our 4-6 week "Career Bootcamps" are designed to help bridge the gap between someone's design education and their first design job. Students will work with a mentor to identify specific projects based on their goals (we're also partnering with some great nonprofits and startups so students can work on real client projects). The...