User Transparency - How would you be more transparent with your users? - Ideas are welcomed :)

Hi Indie Hackers,

Over the last few years of building, hosting, and running my own SaaS businesses i've noticed a number of pain points when it comes to keeping the users/visitors updated and informed on project progress. I've learnt that better transparency not only promotes accountability and collaboration but most importantly builds trust and connection between a project's creators and its users. This generally leads to better user retention and an increase in the willingness for users to recommend your project which in turn greatly affects project growth.

Knowing this, i'd like to try to help alleviate some of the user transparency issues many of us face when building out our projects by creating a simple web application starting with the features as described below:

Feature/idea validation and submission for users to influence change and have more say in the development of the core project itself.
Feedback options for users to report on issues they facing and possible areas of improvement within a project.
A changelog to record notable changes, bug fixes, etc to ensure users remain updated on project progress.
A simple status page with live project/website status, incident reporting, email notification signup, and status announcements for up-to-date feedback on project downtimes and planned maintenance.

As fellow Indie Hackers, is there anything you would change, add, or remove to to make this project more useful? What other issues have you faced while attempting to be more transparent with your users?

I'd love to hear your thoughts :)

Thanks in advance,

Nigel Fahey

posted to

Ideas and Validation

on January 22, 2021

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I'm guessing you already have TOS and privacy policy setup. If you don't have TLDR; versions of those, that might be a good thing to add.

Would be good to set some sort of threshold for users to influence changes/development. Be clear with the criteria of the threshold so that a small group of people don't think that their ideas were ignore or weren't welcome. Invite them to recruit others to support their idea to meet/exceed the threshold.

I think this is good what you are doing. ALl the best!

ksp

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3 years ago
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  Thanks @ksp, yes absolutely. I've got the basic TOS in the works but a TLDR version might be of greater value to the end users.
  
  Exactly! To make it more clear to users I was thinking more along the lines of polling the top 5 suggestions over a set period of time (for example, every month). Each suggestion/feature request could be submitted and upvoted according to the users and the top 5 suggestions would be considered/implemented. This would potentially solve the issue of leaving users feeling left out.
  
  Thanks again for your suggestions :)
  
  ByteBound
  
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  3 years ago
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