How to completely screw up a successful product 😀

When I was 18 years old, I launched a photo editing app called Photo Magik. It was early in the AppStore days. It was considerably better than Instagram, the uncontested photo editing leader at that time. My app topped Instagram in rank & downloads in 80 countries. Here's how I completely screwed it up. Steps: 1. Recruit a bad team. This is easy to do, and hard to undo. It will help you hate working on your product and will surely cause poor productivity. 2. Never talk to your customers. After all, they don't know how to build things. They are muggles in the world of creating. You surely know best and will enjoy building useless features. 3. Offer no customer support whatsoever. It's only an app after all. It costs only a few bucks to purchase. Who could possibly want any support, or have any questions? 4. Last but not least, focus on monetization. Monetization must come before retention. Now, I won't be too hard on myself. The app grew way faster than I was growing myself, and I was barely 18. And I had no one around me to guide me on funding, or startups. But, that experience ignited something in me about startups to this day. But it's fun to think back. Instagram must've had a bit of scare seeing how fast my app grew, and they must've been so happy to see it go down after that. Little did they know who was behind it 😀. Now I build classtra (https://classtra.org), an all-in-one, A.I. powered live academy platform to help academies and instructors conduct engaging live sessions. Check us out.