User feedback is critical for product survival

They say “make something people want”. But how do you find out what people want?

There is so many ways to do that: from simply running ads to see what message people click on — and all the way up to in-person deep user interviews.

Depending on what you're working on and the stage you're at, different strategies may work better for you.

For me, the most feedback-starved period for my products (as an indiehacker as well as a product manager at early stage startups) is in the early stages. When I already know the idea seems to have legs and I get some initial traction but it's not very clear what people want.

Not knowing what people want makes it really difficult to improve the product efficiently or at all. Yes, I can rely on my experience and product sense to figure things out but it only takes me so far.

• Will users like this new feature I'm thinking about?

• How do I make it 10x better?

• Is there a hidden opportunity that would make my product 10x more attractive?

• Is there an adjacent user segment I'm not thinking about?

• Can I charge more?

• What does it take to make the users fall in love with the product?

• How can I improve user retention?

• Am I doing something good for the world?

So many questions. And then, there is this.

People don't like to give feedback. It's time-consuming, they need to think, and they just don't care enough. Especially when you're early and you don't yet have a fanbase.

You want qualitative feedback (free-form thoughts, open-ended questions), not quantitative (pick a number on a scale). There isn't much to quantify when you're early but there is everything to figure out about the product.

People are bad at giving qualitative feedback. It's a skill that doesn't come naturally to most. They also don't know what you need to hear as they're not developers themselves.

People like to propose solutions ("I want a red button over there") but that's typically useless — you want to get to the underlying problem ("I often accidentally delete things I didn't intend to, because I'm a mom of 3 and I'm always distracted"). You're the professional who knows how to solve problems best, not the user.

There is danger in delivering what people literally ask for — you need to really examine the root problem and come up with the best solution within your constraints. More like "feedback-informed" less like "feedback-driven."

When you don't have many users yet, you want to understand each and every one of them as deeply as you can. That means exploring what they do in the product, contrasting that with the feedback they gave, and trying to understand their world and how your product fits into it. It's very much about the discovery and not that much about the numbers.

Well, someone might have thought long and hard about the problem and came up with a great solution 😉