61–70 of 140 posts
I think I'm too cynical to do these kinds of side businesses... I look at this and am confused why anyone is paying for it. I often find it hard to step away from what I would do compared to what others will do.
> "You don’t have to care about competitors. It’s a waste of time. Because you know where to go. You can ignore even if they stole features your product has. Because you are the person who most understands your product, how it works and why it works." I enjoyed this article, but this bit I'm not entirely convinced by. The saying does go that competition leads to innovation. Instagram Stories were a great business mov…
Regarding customer feedback: As soon as you reach a certain scale, it gets really hard. For my app, I have hundreds of feature requests, and for 95% of them all I can say is, that's a nice idea, but I don't have time to do it. For the remaining 5% it'll take me a year or longer to implement them. For customers this looks like I'm unresponsive. When I started out, I often added features in a few days, and customers we…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haha thank you for that. I have been in the market for a new term, for what to say to people what my goal is with my side projects. Up until now I have been saying, it's not making much, it's all supposed to be for some "beer money"... Welp. I stopped drinking. Now I can call it ramen money instead. Cool! (I do dropshipping of computer hardware, specializing in computerchips). And currently building an OS-disk to the…
It's not my terminology: http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html
Roadmaps are really important to me. When I'm evaluating a new service, I first look for a published roadmap. Specifically: * When the next version will be released (specific date, not just bullshit stuff like "Q1 2019") * What new features it will have If I can't find anything like this, I'm less likely to sign up.
> "You don’t have to care about competitors. It’s a waste of time. Because you know where to go. You can ignore even if they stole features your product has. Because you are the person who most understands your product, how it works and why it works." I enjoyed this article, but this bit I'm not entirely convinced by. The saying does go that competition leads to innovation. Instagram Stories were a great business mov…
Regarding customer feedback: As soon as you reach a certain scale, it gets really hard. For my app, I have hundreds of feature requests, and for 95% of them all I can say is, that's a nice idea, but I don't have time to do it. For the remaining 5% it'll take me a year or longer to implement them. For customers this looks like I'm unresponsive. When I started out, I often added features in a few days, and customers we…
This seems like good advice to maximize personal satisfaction on a side project. Many of the tidbits are the exact opposite of advice for startups that are trying to maximize value.
This story is a data point that proves that it's possible, not that this gives you a better (or even good) chance at succeeding. Hell, I would wager that greater exposure would have led to much higher sales.
This story strikes me as (at least partly) survivorship bias. It's great that they were able to acquire 600 paid customers without advertizing their product on blogs, and ignoring their competitors. I don't have hard numbers to back me up, but I doubt that this is a successful strategy in general. This story is a data point that proves that it's possible , not that this gives you a better (or even good) chance at suc…
Agree on your point about ads though
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regarding customer feedback: As soon as you reach a certain scale, it gets really hard. For my app, I have hundreds of feature requests, and for 95% of them all I can say is, that's a nice idea, but I don't have time to do it. For the remaining 5% it'll take me a year or longer to implement them. For customers this looks like I'm unresponsive. When I started out, I often added features in a few days, and customers we…
I don't think customers need to see every feature they request actioned, or even actioned quickly. As long as you're shipping new features and communicate both your roadmap and with individual feature requests, I think people understand. I do, however, think you need to balance big featured with quick wins that make a subset of your clients significantly more happy.
If I share a public roadmap, and then I don't deliver, people will be disappointed.
So I've started to only tell people about new features once they are stable enough for testing.
I don't want to build up expectations when I'm not sure when/if I can deliver.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regarding customer feedback: As soon as you reach a certain scale, it gets really hard. For my app, I have hundreds of feature requests, and for 95% of them all I can say is, that's a nice idea, but I don't have time to do it. For the remaining 5% it'll take me a year or longer to implement them. For customers this looks like I'm unresponsive. When I started out, I often added features in a few days, and customers we…
Side note about your apps: I've used Postico for a year or two now and I really love it! Great job :)