Everything I learned from making a business that books don't teach

I've read tons of books on making business. It's taught me a lot, but some of the most valuable lessons were from actually building the product. This is some of what I've learned: 1. Take long walks. Think aloud. Go through the current issues of your product and improve on it. All my best ideas have come from being on a walk. Also, keep a small notebook on you, so you can write ideas you have at any time. 2. For each of your competitors, use their app and think of why someone would use that over yours. Then, don't just copy features. Understand the underlying user need they're solving and make a better way to meet it. 3. Get lots of feedback! Spend lots of time engaging with your users. Start a Discord and make it very visible on the website, make the support email visible too. 4. Innovation takes a long time (going from 0 to 1). But all you really have to do is keep trying different things, take what works, and then keep trying more. If you look at evolution, that is an example of how innovation can work. Evolution didn't know where it was going, it just tried many things for many years and eventually humans evolved into existence. Naval Ravikant once said "It's not 10,000 hours, it's 10,000 iterations." Just keep iterating! 5. How to market: Go into niche Reddits and write posts that provide lots of value, and make the reader naturally curious about the product. Don't say stuff like "Check out [product name]!". Market literally every day. There's a quote somewhere like "Most products die because no one knows about them, not because their competitor killed them." 6. Show that lots is happening. On my website, I have a changelog in the sidebar that shows "new" whenever I release an update. I release like 5 updates a day. Almost every day the user logs in, they can see that your product has improved. Also, have a roadmap. 7. Sit down with people in real life and watch as they use your product. If you can't use real users, ask your friends, family, etc. Take notes. This will help you figure out tons of issues about your product. I really hope this helps! If anyone has any other tips to add, comment them. I'd love to hear.