From my response on the Yabbly Startup Survivor Challenge: What’s been the most unexpected lesson you’ve learned in your current startup so far? Why do you think you it was hard to learn that lesson until this venture? What are specific actions, tradeoffs, or processes you are or will be implementing to fully leverage this new insight?

Two lessons really stand out for me.

The first is pretty simple, and it falls under the “many hats” rubric. In the past, when I’ve been a part of startups, I was always part of a pair or team that included people with formal training in business (read: MBAs). And so all of the thinking and work around corporate structure, fundraising, equity, etc. was something that naturally fell outside of my ken and scope. When starting Lucky Oyster, I thought that I really needed a “business partner” to start the company properly, raise seed funding, etc. That assumption turned out to be totally untrue. With a little smarts, some research, and a great lawyer, the process of papering a corporation, building a cap table, issuing board resolutions, raising money, etc. is completely doable. Turns out that work isn’t so arcane after all. Great surprise….

The second is much more complex, and it has to do with my understanding of what makes a “good” product. I’m still working through what it means, but the short version is that if you’re going to build a mobile product, no amount of consumer research you conduct to define a “great” product will prove useful; instead, everything comes down to the choice of the consumer to use–and more importantly, repeat use–the app. Unlike the Web, where we can strong-arm adoption through tactics like search, mobile apps need to stand alone, in an application space far more intimate than the desktop: the hand.

There are a ton of implications: if you’re going to be a great product “in the hand”, then things like the difference between a “fling” and a “tap” are viscerally important. Also, and here’s the key learning for me: the proof in the pudding is in the use of the product. This means building simple, and light, and quick, and getting the product into peoples’ hands, in the wild, as fast as possible.

If you’re going to try to build a great product for mobile, prototype and product are identical. This stresses measurement and observation of the app, far more than study, planning, and design.

In our first mobile product, the hard lesson we learned was that no amount of consumer research, independent of method or scope, could stand in for actually having the product in market. And so we’re now organized around evolving the product in market, as we actually gather insight from use: quick turns, an emphasis on simplicity, and a willingness to cut features instead of adding them.