Seeking feedback to drive feature development

Hi all, I just wanted to share the story of recent feature development at real email.

Since starting Real Email, I've been targeting the developer niche. My dream customer is the API user who trickles in constant usage that adds up to be worth a lot. The once off users arent were the money is. So I thought the API was all I needed to build. I didnt want to waste time building a csv work flow.

After not getting much traction I decided to give csv processing a go. Maybe it was the feature I've been missing to make the product click. So I thought of a cheap way of building it that would test out the idea. I made it all in the browser, which had the caveats that you needed to keep the window open, and it wouldnt work well for large files. This seemed to go well, the new feature had usage very quickly. But it still wasnt taking off.

I've also been pushing to get feedback from users. By sending personalised follow up welcome emails, offering help, and asking leading questions.

One day I got an enquiry from a potential customer saying they had 200,000 emails to test and what was the best way to do it. I directed them to the API, gave them their options with the CSV. But I was left feeling that this was a lame solution for that customer. It would be easier for them if they could just give me a file and I could give them a file back.

The next bit of feedback I got from a customer was when a developer was telling me about their use case and how they hoped to use my service. They said they wanted to do a big file to start with then would have an automated API flow.

So the advanced csv file management feature was born. It took much longer to build than the first one, there is a lot more to consider, from security, performance & scalability.

The Real Email bulk csv validation is now ready and im hoping people find it useful. Its able to validate a file of about 200,000 emails in 1 hour.

Remember to seek feedback where ever you can.

Happy Hacking.