After nine months building in private, trying to open up

I can’t yet tell whether my approach works. The first small batch of testers didn’t give much feedback. For the next batch I’m tweaking the invite to better frame their first use, and I’m rewriting the follow-up to be less daunting.

As for positioning, I think that this essay by Nathan Baschez has affected how I approach this early stage the most.

I have tried to simplify this first version as much as I could – deferring anything until later that wasn’t absolutely critical to include in the early version to conduct tests on. What I took away from Baschez was to make the product itself very narrow, but be very open to who responds to it, and why.

The design of my product is based on my particular view of the problem, but it might still appeal to people who have a different view of the problem – and I’m trying to be open to that.

At this stage, I’m trying to see if the product makes sense to people on first use. So I have said very little about what it does and how it works.

If I get feedback that tells me that it’s unclear or confusing, I will have to work on making it more obvious on first use. If people get it, I will start talking more about how it works and what using it day-to-day looks like.

But all of this is just a hypothesis right now. I hope that I can figure out how to remove the obstacles for testers to provide feedback.

Thank you for responding! Good luck to you too. I’d like to hear more about your product.

I expect to iterate a bit on the target audience. So I’ll try to keep an open mind.

The broad target audience is in the one-sentence pitch in my post: people who don’t budget. I think there are many of those, but few product offerings – which I find a bit odd. Almost all products are based in some way on the idea of budgets: categories, tracking spending against those categories, pie charts.

Further narrowing down the target audience, on the one hand there are people for whom it’s a struggle to make their money last until next pay day – and on the other hand there are those who want to limit their spending for some reason.

Often you hear that you should define an extremely narrow target audience, and focus on that. I’m not sure how to approach this. Perhaps just come up with one and try it for a while, then move on to another one?

In a way, I have shaped the product for a narrow target audience through the decisions I’ve made about what the app does and how it does it. I’ve narrowed down the feature set as much as I have could. Maybe it makes sense to approach it as casting a wide net to figure out for whom this product is appealing, and figuring out why that is so – how they understand the product and how it could fit into their lives?

I hope to get a bit of clarity about how to proceed with this during early testing. So we’ll see.

Thank you for asking!

I think I want to write short things like the one above, about things that are currently on my mind regarding the project. And I don’t think it matters to me that it’s each day, or at a consistent schedule. If I have something that I think is interesting or that I found challenging or surprising, maybe it can be of value to someone else. Thank you, and good luck to you too!

Most personal finance apps are based on the traditional idea of budgets: categorise spending, see diagrams for each category, and so on. My app is a bit different, and I want the onboarding to instill its core ideas in users, so that’s what I hope to achieve during early tests. Thank you for your encouraging words!

Thank you!

Thank you!

I don’t know. :)