You discovered why design comes before development in mature development organizations. Design, fundamentally, is a medium of communication. Creating an explain

You discovered why design comes before development in mature development organizations. Design, fundamentally, is a medium of communication. Creating an explainer video, creating a UI, and creating experiences are all communicating to your users how to interact with your software. Unless your users are also technical, (and sometimes even then,) if you don't know what you're going to say, starting off with implementing how you're going to say it will often lead to failure. > careful UX and UI > people we just confused and nobody signed up. If you believe you did those things by yourself without interacting with potential users, not only were you not careful, but you probably didn't satisfy the bare minimum requirements for a basically functional UI/UX . User interface design and user experience design are two distinct professions with relevant college degrees and career paths. That so many developers think they can just intuit their way through these processes based on osmosis-gained knowledge is exactly why we need designers in the first place. First, get design input on your new project. That you made something usable enough doesn't mean you can replicate that as you expand. To turn this around, a designer in a technical environment could probably hack together a PHP app that got the job done for simple use cases but it would quickly fall apart upon scaling it up. Second, get design input on your first project. It's quite likely that your product is genuinely useful but you simply don't know how to communicate that to the user. If you can't do it in an explainer video, you almost certainly couldn't do it through an appropriate interface.