The more feedback I get, the less interested I am in giving advice
I originally thought helping people meant giving them better tools.
Now I’m wondering if helping people sometimes means creating a space where they feel understood instead.
Still exploring.
But it’s changing how I think about the product.
This resonates. I've been building a small tool for devs to share their GitHub repos as social cards — the initial framing was "here's the tool, here's the output." But the feedback that actually moved me was someone saying "this makes my project look real." Not faster, not prettier. Real. That's a feeling, not a feature. Your distinction between giving tools vs creating a space to feel understood is something I think every tool builder has to wrestle with at some point. The best tools maybe do both — but you usually have to earn the trust through the second before the first lands.
I love that example. “This makes my project look real” says so much more than any feature request ever could.
That’s part of what I’ve been thinking about with Unjam. People rarely describe the value they get in terms of features. They describe it in terms of how it makes them feel.
The more conversations I have, the more I think the goal isn’t to help people solve every problem. It’s to help them feel seen enough that they can start dealing with those problems themselves.
I think you’re right that trust probably comes before utility more often than we realize.
This resonates deeply. I think there's a real inflection point for founders where you realize the bottleneck isn't always the tool - it's whether the person feels heard. The best feedback I've gotten came from people who first made me feel like they understood where I was coming from, not just critiqued the product. That creates psychological safety to actually change things. Curious how this is shifting your product roadmap.
I think it’s making me prioritize reflection over solutions.
A few months ago, I probably would’ve spent my time building features that helped people do more. Now I’m much more interested in helping people understand what they’re carrying and realize they’re not the only ones carrying it.
That’s a big reason behind ideas like the anonymous wall and the Teen Forecast. Instead of immediately trying to solve someone’s feelings, the goal is to help them feel seen first.
I’m still figuring it out, but the roadmap is definitely becoming less about productivity and more about shared human experiences.