How do you decide which early feedback to trust?
How do you decide which early feedback deserves a place on the roadmap when you’re building an indie product?
I’m trying to separate useful signal from polite encouragement. A few things I’ve been weighing:
- repeated pain from people who have actually tried the product
- a workaround someone already uses
- a specific request tied to a real workflow
- behavior that contradicts what people say
Which signal has most reliably changed your decisions—and what turned out to be noise?
I’m thinking about this while working on IndieNeed; the product page is https://www.indieneed.com/submit if context is useful.
Your fourth item is doing most of the work and the other three are versions of it. The rule I use is to weight feedback by what it cost the person to give. Somebody who already built a workaround has paid for their opinion in time, and that one is almost always real. Somebody who wrote three unprompted paragraphs has paid. Somebody answering a question you asked has paid nothing, and politeness is free, which is why that feedback is the pleasant useless kind. The other half is treating a feature request as a diagnosis rather than data: the request is their guess at a fix, and what belongs on the roadmap is the situation that produced it.