I spent 48 hours using my product with my first 6 users

Setting the Stage

As the title suggests I did in fact spend 48 hours using my own app with my first 6 users. However... it might not be what you think.

Those 6 users are some of my closest friends, but they all are active users of my SAAS app.

Our app aims to better immense players inside of a Dungeon Masters world. If you don't play Dungeons and Dragons that may not make a ton of sense to you.

So generally the way the game is played is, everyone sits around a table and one person, the Dungeon Master (TM), writes a story and creates a world that they share with the rest of members at the table. Our tool aims to help the Dungeon Master share and express those ideas in a more immersive way to their players.

With that 10000 foot overview of how D&D works, I can move onto why I spent 48 hours with my first 6 users.

Every 3-4 months my friends and I get together to play D&D all weekend which we've appropriately called "D&D Weekend". During a D&D weekend we sit around for 5 hours at a time at the table playing D&D, only breaking to eat and then jumping back in for another session.

We've done many of these in the past, but now that our app was nearing Beta ready stage we decided to play test it by using the tool the entire weekend.

Below is a few takeaways I learned after using my app with my friends the entire weekend.

Find the Bugs

Two major things I learned here.

1. Before you give your software to any user in any production setting make sure you have some way to track and monitor error. I use HoneyBadger to monitor my production logs. I have no affiliation with them I just think their tool is great and would recommend them. Two times while we were playing another player at the table was trying to do something, and before they could say something wasn't working I already got the alert on my phone. I was able to log in both time, diagnose the issues and push changes within a reasonable amount of time.
2. Getting your product in the hands of actual users starts to surface edge case bugs and things you couldn't possibly test or predict. Getting people at a small scale to hit these issues makes your life as an indie hacker much more manageable when you know you're only blocking a few people and the turn around to fix some of these show stopping bugs can be almost instant.

Observe, Analyze and Adjust

Watching how people actually interact and use your product is invaluable. There were countless times I would lean over another players shoulder to just see how they were clicking around, navigating, and generally using the tool. I was able to on the spot as questions like, "why didn't you click X?", "did you know about Y?", "how would you want Z to happen?" which is invaluable data to take back with me to use to iterate on the product.

Trim the Fat

Getting to see how your users in action using the app gives you insights to how they actually use your software. It might surprise you that they don't click the thing you expected them to click or they don't find the thing you want them to find the way you might have originally expected.

I removed 3 Features that I "thought" were important

I got to see what users actually needed and wanted I was able to make a decision to remove some useless features from the app. Which may sound sad since I took the time to build them initially. However the time to maintain and test them every time I release something new is a huge time saver. Not to mention, the cause of most of the bugs mentioned above stems from one of the features I removed.

I would say 80% of the features I put in were useful to the group and 20%.. maybe less were just not used or even considered by the group. I just remove them for the time being and maybe some day they'll make their way back into the app when the time or audience is right.

Final thoughts

Overall it was a ton of fun to sit down and watch people use the thing I built. Outside of the few bugs that surfaced everything went pretty smoothly and overall the group seemed to get a lot of value and use out of the tool!

Another huge benefit was, because it was such a positive experience it helps motivate me to keep working toward a beta release where more people will get access and start playing with the tool.

If you have a chance early on to sit down with your users do it.

Play Dungeons and Dragons? Want to learn? We love when people geek out on this stuff with us and would love to have you! check out AdventurePlane to learn more