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.
Really good writeup, thanks for sharing it. What's the next thing you're planning to try here?
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.