Is your product a vitamin or painkiller?

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to share a challenging but honest update I think fellow builders should learn from. I've been working on gSweets for nearly a year now. Having done 20+ user interviews pre-launch we had a sense early on that the project was seen more as a vitamin than a painkiller – that is more of a nice-to-have than a must-have. We were ok with that at the time since we thought it was a fun project and that it could be a foot in the door to building more meaningful features on top of Google Docs.

Given that we were building on top of Google Docs, and that we had a high quality bar for the UX, it took us months to get the core feature ready, and then a few more months to build features on top of it like GIPHY, Unsplash and Emojis.

We launched on PH and within a couple of months had nearly 2K installs in the chrome webstore. We were soon nominated for a Golden Kitty Award for productivity. We were feeling pretty motivated and confident that things were heading in the right direction.

Unfortunately, felt we were missing 2 things, users emails and product analytics. We implemented product analytics and user accounts. We could finally communicate directly with our users and see how useful our product was to them.

After a few weeks of tracking, the data didn't lie. We had a very small group of users who would use gSweets a couple of times a week, but it was safe to say that overwhelmingly – users were not using gSweets. It was hard to accept given how much time was sunk into the project but we couldn't argue with the data. The biggest challenge was that although we have ideas on how to increase the value & frequency of usage, the platform risk of building on top of Google Docs was too high.

One of our teammates summed it up well. Normally you accept product risk OR technical risk. We had accepted both and it bit us in the ass.

We're still extremely motivated to continue improving the lives of the many PMs, Marketers and writers who've trusted us thus far. I just know that as we continue on this journey we're going to be try an follow these rules:

1. If you're not sure if it's a painkiller or a vitamin, launch in less than a month.
2. Either way launch with a paid plan to validate the pain.
3. Accept the technical risk for a painkiller that you've validated. Don't accept it if you know what you're building is really a vitamin.

That's it. If you have any questions feel free to drop a comment below.
I hope this is helpful to other builders out there.