The feature we almost built... until users told us otherwise
One of the biggest lessons we've learned while building JustBlogged is that excitement isn't evidence.
We've had features that sounded great internally but barely came up in user conversations.
At the same time, seemingly small frustrations especially around publishing workflows kept appearing over and over.
Those repeated patterns have become far more valuable than our original assumptions.
I'm curious: what's a feature you almost built, only to realize users didn't actually need it?
Funny enough this whole thread is basically the argument for what I am building. FounderFlow exists because founders keep missing the quiet, repeated stuff in their own business the same way you are describing with feature requests, it just gets buried in day to day noise instead of a comment section. We have gone back and forth a few times now and you clearly think hard about signal versus noise, so I would genuinely like your take on it. Want me to show you how it works sometime?
Just bringing this back up in case it got buried under everything else. Still would genuinely value your take on FounderFlow if you have a few minutes sometime.
Glad that landed. It is one of those lines that sounds obvious until you are the one who has to say it to a paying customer.
Exactly. It's easy to believe an idea is valuable until you have to prove that value to someone who's actually paying for it. That's been a useful reality check for us.
Repeated small frustrations beating a single exciting idea is a pattern that shows up everywhere, and it is easy to miss because a recurring annoyance rarely gets described with the same energy as a feature request. The tell worth watching for is not how many people mention something, it is whether they mention it unprompted, in the middle of describing something else, since that usually means it is actually costing them time rather than just sounding good when asked directly.
That's a great observation. We've found the same thing. Unprompted frustrations usually reveal much stronger product signals than direct feature requests. Those conversations have started shaping our roadmap more than brainstorming sessions.
Makes sense, and it probably also protects you from building for the loudest requesters instead of the people actually stuck. Someone who mentions a pain point in passing while describing their workflow usually is not trying to influence your roadmap at all, so there is no incentive to exaggerate it.
Exactly, It's not wrong to say!