21–30 of 64 posts
I tell people that I'm not precious about my stuff, and if something sucks I want them to tell me so that I can make it better. The other thing that I find works really well is "what is your least favorite thing about this tool?"
> Especially when you're just starting out, and have no users yet. Add analytics, even rudimentary. Something like PostHog is good. Add monitoring (Sentry) so you catch exceptions in your code when soon to be people and systems use your product without them having to report them. You'll fix problems faster and prioritize (most frequent, most impactful, etc). Create a Slack workspace where your users could ask questio…
Thanks for the detailed answer, this is very useful.
When we started out with Quepid, we found a small handful of champions that loved the idea and advocated heavily for adopting the tool in their orgs. They became an extension of the team. We engaged with them all the time. We did everything we could to take their feedback seriously. Even if they never even converted their orgs to heavy users, their feedback was worth the high level of investment.
We also offered consulting services and would use the tool on our own projects. Here we were the customer to ourselves, and had to ensure the product was stable during engagements.
During consulting, we would train up teams on the tool. We could see where they fell in love with it and where it wasn’t a good fit.
As a SaaS product, we weren’t successful. We decided to focus on just the consulting business model. In the end Quepid became open source, and the community built around it seeded the open source community.
Definitely lots of feedback from everyone possible. Try and have someone other than you ask in some cases, because people will be deferential and kind to you as inventor/creator. Sometimes you can get small grants to cover professional advice, which can include feedback, or sometimes there will be events where you can get such advice from experts for free. I also help run an invetors' club, and that is another good v…
Not trying to clever here but you’re missing a letter in the most interesting word. Is what you run an invester’s club, or an inventor’s club?
Most people should avoid friends and family. Or rather "normies" who aren't your target market. You'll get dishonest replies by people who want to support you, people who are blindly envious, people who want to sound clever or helpful. You'll often get feedback like "this costs too much" or "this is too ugly", when your actual target market is happy for it.
Have you read The Mom Test? Highly recommended. Here's a summary: https://www.slideshare.net/xamde/summary-of-the-mom-test The closer you are to the target user and target buyer (not necessarily the same person), the better. You can learn a lot from anyone, but it might be at a pretty abstract level and less useful. Focus as much as you can on users and buyers. Speak with them often, observe what they do often, where…
Perhaps more useful answer is to be part of a practitioner community, as you noted.
Me: “The lights are too bright, right?” (Hardware product)
User: “No they are fine but I wish the display was larger.”
I think questioning like this makes user comfortable criticising you.
I’ve noticed that asking leading _negative_ questions opens up people a lot. Me: “The lights are too bright, right?” (Hardware product) User: “No they are fine but I wish the display was larger.” I think questioning like this makes user comfortable criticising you.