Your first 10 users - the hard truths and questions

Over the past few weeks, we've been hard at work onboarding new users from our soft launch.

We've learned a lot, and we've received a lot of constructive feedback - and that's the one hard pill we had to swallow.

I received a LOT of incredibly positive feedback:

"Wow, the design is beautiful"
"The homepage looks incredible"

And countless more bits of awesome, positive feedback.

This felt amazing, we knew we were onto something. However, positive feedback comes with constructive, and less positive feedback too.

I've always said, "please be absolutely honest" in feedback, because that's how you learn and grow - but it doesn't make it any easier to accept that something, for example, a feature you've spent 30+ hours working on doesn't quite hit the mark.

You know it isn't personal, and you know it's constructive, but it hurts! It will hurt when you're told something isn't quite right, or it can be a lot better - but you need to find the positives, and understand that this feedback will improve your product.

You'll receive feedback - for example:

"I don't understand how reporting works"

How do you use this feedback? By itself, it's not very helpful - how do you extract value?

You provide follow up questions.

• "How would you expect reporting to work?"
• "What confuses you about the current system"?

Use open-ended questions to extract value from your feedback, and use it to identify patterns and create results.