The day we stopped building features and started talking to users
Hi everyone,
When we first launched Trackly, we made a very common mistake. We thought we knew exactly what our users wanted.
For the first few months, we stayed inside our own little bubble. We spent all our time coding "cool" features that we thought were amazing. But when we checked our dashboard, nobody was actually using them. Our growth was completely stuck.
It was a scary moment. We felt like we were failing.
So, we decided to do something different. We stopped coding for a whole week. Instead, we sent simple emails to our active users and asked them: "What is the one thing you hate about managing your hybrid team workflow right now?"
The answers shocked us. The features they actually needed were so much simpler than the complex things we were building. They just wanted a cleaner way to see daily updates without the noise.
We immediately changed our plans. We threw away our complicated ideas and built exactly what they asked for. Guess what? Our engagement doubled in just two weeks.
My biggest learning:
Your users have all the answers. Don't sit in a dark room trying to guess what to build next. Talk to them, listen to their complaints, and let them guide your product roadmap.
How often do you talk to your users? What is the best feedback you ever got? Let me your side of story in the comments section.
I did the same thing with FLUX...kept adding signals because I thought more = better, and ended up with something that was technically comprehensive and practically useless for anyone under time pressure.
"talk to users more" didn't help me (I wasn't talking to enough people to learn that way). What helped me was asking a different question. Instead of "what do they need to know" I started asking "what do they need to decide right now." Reframing it cut half the features out of the product and made the other half actually useful.
The feature you thought mattered is almost never the one that changes behavior. The one you almost didn't build usually is.
Love this, Mark. That reframe is gold: 'What do they need to decide right now' instead of 'What do they need to know.'
It's the ultimate filter for cutting through the noise. And your last line is a classic founder truth the 'sleeper' features we almost skip are so often the ones that actually drive the core behavior. Appreciate you sharing the FLUX story!
Every founder knows they need to do this, but not everybody follows through. Doubling engagement off direct user emails is a strong conversion rate, what did the outreach actually say, and did you email everyone or just your most active users? I'm just wondering because I've seen "who you ask" matter as much as the questions themselves.
Segmentation is everything. We actually only emailed our most active users because we wanted insights from people who were already feeling the daily friction, not casual drop-offs.
As for the exact outreach, we kept it incredibly short and zero-pitch.t turns out they didn't want the complex features we were building; they just wanted a cleaner, noise-free way to see daily updates.
That's a really good insight, I found a lot of teams build the complexity nobody asked for and only find out after they finally ask. Sounds like the segmentation you picked (active users, not casual drop-offs) gave you the best answer instead of "what people say they want." Nice case study.
Thank you
This is a massive lesson that every founder needs to hear. We often fall in love with our features instead of the user's actual problem. Loving the focus on simplicity—congrats on doubling the engagement!
I can relate to this. Those first few users are by far the hardest to find, but they're also the ones who give the most valuable feedback. For us, direct outreach and genuine conversations worked much better than waiting for people to discover the product. Every conversation taught us something we ended up improving.
Direct outreach is definitely the best way to start.
When you have zero traction, waiting for people to just 'find' your product never works. Those early, raw conversations give you insights that you can never get from charts or analytics.
I completely agree. That's been our experience with Trackly as well. Our first customers didn't just validate the product they changed it. Conversations with call center managers and remote teams helped us simplify workflows, improve visibility, and build features that solved real operational problems instead of the ones we assumed existed. Those early conversations were far more valuable than any analytics dashboard.
Love this insight. It’s so easy to fall in love with our own assumptions until a real user completely flips the roadmap. Nothing beats that raw feedback from remote teams. Congrats on finding those early champions for Trackly.
yeah thanks
This is a massive lesson that almost every founder has to learn the hard way. The week of talking always beats another month of blind feature building.
What stands out to me here is how simple the actual solution was compared to what you were over-engineering. It’s a great reminder that users don't want 'complex,' they just want their specific friction removed. Congrats on doubling engagement!
Thank you
this matches what i've seen too — the week of talking beats another month of features.
the hard part before traction is usually not "what to ask" — it's finding people who already feel the pain this week, not polite friends who'll take a call.
what worked for me: communities where the ICP describes the problem in their own words (pain phrases, not product category), then 1:1 helpful replies before any ask. warmer than cold emailing strangers with "can i interview you."
curious — for Trackly, were those first hybrid-team users from your network, or did you find them in communities / elsewhere?
Thanks for the great comment! For Trackly, it was actually a mix of both.
At first, we asked a few friends from our network just to test the basic idea. But like you said, friends can be too polite.
To find people who really felt the pain, we went to Slack channels and Reddit groups where remote managers talk. We didn't pitch right away. We just replied to their posts and tried to help them first. That worked so much better than cold emailing!
Your point about looking for 'pain phrases' instead of product categories is 100% true.
this is exactly it — friends are too polite, communities where remote managers already vent is where the real language shows up.
helping first before any ask is also why replies convert better than cold email.
curious: for Reddit specifically, how long does the daily hunt take you now — still manageable, or starting to eat real time? if useful, i can pull a small sample of threads where remote/hybrid managers describe workflow pain in their own words (scores + why matched, no pitchy drafts). free — only if you're actually replying there this week.
Right now, checking Reddit takes me about 30 to 45 minutes every day. It is still manageable, but it definitely feels like real work now!
And wow, thank you so much for the offer! I am actually planning to reply to threads this week, so that small sample of threads would be incredibly helpful. Please send it over whenever you can!
here's a small sample for Trackly, scored threads where managers/ops talk attendance, team ops, and time-tracking style pain:
https://threadscout-theta.vercel.app/feed/bc3c55b0-b41e-4045-9331-e51f0b115fdf
today's batch is light (3 threads) — Reddit /new was thin on direct "track remote staff" language. if you tell me the exact 3–5 subs you already check + 2–3 phrases you hunt, i'll retune and pull a denser set.
which of these would you actually reply to this week?
I think this is the hardest part when you're just starting. Everyone says talk to users, but getting those first users is the real challenge. I got one conversation that completely changed my onboarding, so I finally understand why people say it matters.
How did you find your first users before you had any traction?
That is so true! Finding those first few users is definitely the hardest part. I am so glad you had that great conversation that changed your onboarding!
For Trackly, we found our first users by going to places where they were already talking about their problems. We joined Slack groups and Reddit communities where remote managers hang out.
Instead of just posting links to our product, we looked for people who were complaining about specific problems. We replied to help them first, and once we made a connection, we asked them to check out Trackly.
I'm curious, what did you learn from that one conversation that changed your onboarding?
The biggest thing I realized was that I was asking people to create an account before they'd experienced any value.
The user said they weren't ready to sign up yet, so I changed the onboarding to let them try Ashive before creating an account. That one conversation completely changed how I think about friction.
I'm curious though when you were helping people first, at what point did you actually introduce Trackly? Did it happen naturally during the conversation, or would you follow up afterward?
It’s a mix of both, but timing is everything. We never pitch in our very first comment. The key is making them feel like an expert advisor or an early tester, rather than a sales target. People love giving feedback, but they hate being sold to.
That makes a lot of sense. Looking back, I think I was too focused on when do I mention the product?" instead of have I actually earned enough trust yet. I like the idea of approaching people as early testers rather than potential customers since it feels much more natural.
I'm curious how do you usually know when it's the right time to mention Trackly? Is it just something you naturally feel during the conversation?
It is a mix of guessing the right moment and looking for green lights. For me, the right time is when they ask how I handle the problem, or when they complain about the exact issue Trackly solves. For example, if someone says, "I hate chasing people for updates," I just naturally tell them that I had the same problem, so I built a simple tool to fix it. Instead of treating them like a customer, I ask for their honest feedback as an expert. This makes the conversation feel friendly and natural, not like a sales pitch.