A user emailed me 4 bugs. I fixed them instead of building my new feature. Best call I made all month.
I'm building NotionLock solo — a tool that adds password protection to public Notion pages.
Last week a user took the time to email me a detailed list of 4 bugs in my onboarding flow: a validation issue, a broken domain-input step, a mobile rendering problem, and a missing account-deletion option. Honest, specific, the kind of feedback you rarely get.
Here's the thing: that same day, I had a shiny new feature I was excited to build. The fun kind of work.
I almost did the feature first. Instead I spent the day fixing his bugs.
It turned out to be the highest-leverage thing I did all month. Those bugs were in the entry flow — the exact place where new signups were quietly getting stuck and leaving. I'd been puzzling over why activation was lower than expected, and the answer wasn't a missing feature. It was friction I couldn't see, because as the founder I knew the happy path by heart and never hit the broken edges.
The feature could wait. The broken flow was costing me every new user.
Two takeaways I keep coming back to:
Real user feedback beats your own assumptions every time. He saw in 5 minutes what I'd missed for weeks.
When building feels more fun than fixing, that's usually the signal to fix.
Building in public from here. Anyone else have a "boring fix > exciting feature" moment that paid off more than expected?
The part that stood out to me wasn't the bug fixes themselves.
It was how long activation can look like one problem before revealing itself as another.
Sometimes fixing the friction solves it.
Sometimes fixing the friction just exposes whatever was underneath it.
I'd be curious whether activation changes in the way you expect now that those issues are gone.
You called it before I even saw it. I just went through my actual signup data — and you're right: fixing the friction exposed what was underneath. The bugs were real and worth fixing, but a lot of signups still do nothing at all (zero pages, zero activity). So the broken flow was one layer; there's clearly a deeper one about who actually has the problem strongly enough to act.
To your question — honestly, too early to tell if activation moves the way I hoped. The new signups post-fix are protecting pages, which is a good sign, but the sample is tiny. What the data did make obvious is that I've been treating "activation" as one number when it's really two problems stacked: can they use it (friction) and do they care enough to (the buying situation). The fix solved the first. The second is the real work.
Good nudge — this is exactly the thread I needed to pull.
That's exactly why I found the thread interesting.
I think it's easier to explain the thought properly over email than in a thread.
What's the best email to reach you on?