Thinking of adding one more feature? Read this
I've been reading through Bugfender interview on IndieHackers and this quote stood out:
Initially we focused on building a functional product with enough functionality to test the idea in the market. However, we quickly realized we needed to focus more on the user experience: explaining the product better in the landing page, lowering the barrier for user onboarding (and then slowly revealing the application features), having a chat to interact with our users, building a knowledge base, etc.
How many times, it's not the product itself that's the "brake" to success, but rather, the user experience... Tettra even has a dedicated blog post on this:
https://thinkgrowth.org/building-on-slack-saved-our-startup-94953fdaf27a
They didn't change ANYTHING about the product...just positioned it "for Slack" and made it work seamlessly with it.
I think that we, as founders, under-estimate the effect of making a product easier for users (easier to understand, easier to on-board etc.) Even the PERCEPTION that something is easier increases conversion. Consider this experiment:
https://marketingexperiments.com/copywriting
where they changed the call-to-action from "Get started now" to "Estimate my monthly payment". The result: 125% more people bought the product.
I build a product last year. I was lucky to get 50 people onboard in 2 weeks. The website was convincing, the registration okay, but once in the app the left. Feedback: not clear what the next step was. All the other features where not even touched.
That's when I decided to stop adding new features, and even killed some features to bring the simplicity back in the app.
I agree. I think there is something about a narrow feature set executed well that will find a market fit even against competitors with more features.
If I look at my current project which is predominantly focussed on the contracting process, sure, I could expand it to include proposals. And then with invoicing, I could expand that to include accounts. But most customers will have an accounting solution already.
And so for me, building it in a manner which integrates well with those other tools is key rather than filling out my own application with competing features.
Im currently building an application in a very crowded market, and i have that exact feeling, "Just one more feature, then ill be able to compete".
Dont you think there is a certain threshold you need to meet, before you can start thinking about user experience?
Or do you think that any product, even with less features, can make it with some great onboarding and user experience.
I think there is a threshold, but it depends on many factors, mainly the units of value you deliver.
I liked Founder2Be interview, where they said:
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At launch, we knew some big features were missing. We were worried to launch with such a bare bones product. But as the saying goes, "If you're not embarrassed when you launch, you didn't launch early enough."
And embarrassed we were.
The first users' main complaints were about the exact features they thought we should have. The good news: this validated what we should focus on next. It took us another three weeks to build those features.
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I'm not sure if it would work in every niche, but the idea they give here is to put your product out there, in a way that you'll know that users will complain about lack of features, and you'll have a good guess of those features. Jeff Atwood, the guy who created StackOveflow (and now Discourse), refers to this as "complaint-driven development": https://blog.codinghorror.com/complaint-driven-development/
Awesome, Thats actually helpful. Thanks for that quote, now im a bit more calm hehe