Good job! Your process sounds smart and hard-earned. I’ve been advocating for more founders to do exactly what you did with cobbling together a passable experience with existing tools. 👏

It sounds like tech is where you get most detached from customer needs (maybe some internal needs, too) for the longest time, so that could be why things went off the rails there in the past? That can be combated with smaller, shippable chunks and hooking design into the process before, during and after building things. (Get in touch if you need ideas there, happy to share and learn. 😉)

I think you can play this game not just with tech, because everyone’s time/resources are valuable. So, it’s almost more like: don’t waste time on the wrong tasks! (Yes, that’s easier said than done.)