Basically, once we assigned the two developers to the project, the team came up with an initial scope for the app, then committed to getting it done.
Without any feedback from our users (see mistake #1), we had decided to take all the features from Hotjar—minus Recordings—and put them into the mobile version.
Again, we thought this would take us a couple of weeks. Tops.
When that turned into a couple of months, no one stopped to ask, what was the smallest thing we could do to help us get this app out in the hands of our users as quickly as possible?
Also, keep in mind that the original goal was to get to an SDK. The app was just an in-between step.
We should have been asking ourselves, ‘what is the minimum viable product here that will help us learn about mobile as quickly as possible so that we can get to the SDK?’
We were so committed to building the damn thing as we had planned it that we chose not to downscope and cut things out.
Partly, this was a symptom of being an early-stage startup that was trying to keep up with rapid growth (a nice problem to have, to be honest). One of the two developers assigned to the app was our Director of Engineering and co-founder, Marc Von Brockdorff, who was essentially a one-man product team and also leading several other initiatives.
At this point, it was around October 2017 and the app was almost complete. So we decided to just ship it and see what would happen.