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Episode Transcript
Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I’m gonna talk to you about is how to avoid falling into the trap of shipping features based on feelings. Now, the reason why I bring this up is because this is very relevant and timely for me in terms of the product that I’ve recently shipped, and I’m working on growing.
I’ve come up with all kinds of ideas that I think users would get value out of. Now, the danger and risk there obviously is it’s coming from me, and it’s not at that moment coming from users that are engaged with the application that are paying customers, which is where this information realistically should come from.
So I need you to understand. If you’re going to continue to make changes to your product without active, without feedback from active users that are paying for access, then you might be steering your product in a suboptimal direction, as in it might be going where you think it should go, but that may not be where your users and ultimately you’re paying customers, feel like, get your go.
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So there’s a balance here that you need to strike effectively. From building and launching your MVP to onboarding a wave of customers, getting an initial round of feedback, and then leveraging that in order to figure out what the future direction of your product should be. So whenever possible, I want you to resist the urge to want to continually make changes.
Especially early on and before you’ve gotten that initial wave of feedback, it’s really important to keep the experience consistent in the beginning so that you give the product and the users enough time to kind of onboard and provide you with that feedback. So if you are kind of getting a little itchy and you want to do more things and make changes, which I completely understand, I’m there myself.
What I would encourage you to do instead is channel that energy into the direction of figuring out how you can engage more with the users that you are hoping to get that feedback from. So if that engagement is low, start thinking through different strategies or communication channels that you can use.
To learn what some of that feedback might be or encourage folks to get, become more active with using your product at the moment. If you do that, that’s going to help you ensure that you de-risk the potential future direction that you want to take your product and ensure that you are not steering it in a direction away from what ultimately you’re paying customers are actually going to need.