Building a product can feel like the hardest part of starting a business. You choose the technology, build the pages, fix bugs, test everything, and eventually put the product in front of people. After weeks or months of work, launching can feel like the finish line. But once the product is live, you quickly discover that building something and getting people to use it are two very different problems.
During development, you control almost everything. You decide what to build, how it should work, and when it is ready. After launch, most of that control disappears. You cannot decide whether people will discover your product, understand what it does, use it regularly, or recommend it to someone else. A product can work perfectly from a technical perspective and still struggle to attract users because the real problem may be distribution, positioning, search visibility, messaging, or user experience.
This became clear while building GamesMom. Creating the website and games was only one part of the work. The bigger challenge was understanding how people would discover the product, which pages would attract attention, what they actually wanted, and what would make them return. These are questions that are difficult to answer before launch because most product decisions are based on assumptions. Real users quickly show you which assumptions were correct and which ones were not.
You might spend days building a feature that barely gets used while something you considered a small feature attracts most of the attention. You might create content around a topic you believe people care about and discover that users are searching for something completely different. You might also find that people arrive at your website but leave quickly because the page does not answer what they expected. None of this necessarily means the product is bad. It means you have learned something that you could not have learned before real people started using it.
This is where early metrics become important. You do not need millions of visitors to start learning from user behavior. Even a small amount of data can show which pages attract attention, what devices people use, where they leave, which content brings visitors through search, and whether people come back. The mistake is reacting to every small change. One day of data may mean very little, but repeated patterns over several weeks can start giving you useful signals about what deserves more attention.
Early data can also change how you think about development. Without user feedback, it is easy to keep adding features because the product feels incomplete. But more features do not automatically make a product better. Sometimes the better decision is to improve something that already exists. If users consistently visit one section, that may be worth expanding. If people arrive through search but leave quickly, there may be a content or experience problem. If people use the product once but never return, the problem may have more to do with usefulness than functionality.
There is another problem that creators often overlook. When you build a product yourself, you know too much about it. You know where everything is, what every button does, and why you made certain decisions. A new user has none of that context. Something that feels obvious to you may be confusing to someone seeing the product for the first time. Real user behavior can expose these gaps much faster than assumptions or internal testing.
The same thing happens with marketing. You may believe you understand your audience, but the people you are trying to reach may use completely different language to describe what they need. You may think one benefit is the main reason people should use your product while users care about something else. Search queries, page behavior, feedback, and conversion data can reveal these differences. Those signals can help shape the product, the content strategy, the positioning, and even the audience you decide to focus on.
For a small team or solopreneur, this matters even more because resources are limited. You cannot build everything, target everyone, and test every possible idea. You have to decide where your limited time will create the most value. That decision should not come only from what you personally want to build. It should also be informed by what users repeatedly show you through their behavior.
This does not mean users should make every product decision. Innovation still requires judgment, and sometimes you need to build something before users know they want it. But completely ignoring user behavior is risky. The strongest product decisions usually come from combining your original vision with what you learn after launch. You start with assumptions, collect evidence, learn what changed, and then adjust the direction.
Building gives you a product, but usage gives you evidence. The first phase is about making something work, while the second phase is about discovering whether it actually works for other people. That second phase is usually slower and less exciting because progress is no longer measured by how many features you have built. It is measured by what you are learning and whether those lessons are helping you make better decisions.
Launching is therefore not the moment when you find out whether you were right. It is the moment when you finally have the opportunity to discover where you were wrong. That feedback can be more valuable than anything you planned during development because it gives you something assumptions never can: a clearer understanding of what people actually want.
