From instant noodles to Michelin stars: improving products with feedback
by Gaël de MondragonHey, fellow indie hackers!
A month ago, I launched yesRamen, a website where makers seeking feedback post their products and offer rewards to users who provide feedback. With my previous post, I wanted to test whether people were incentivized enough to give feedback on other products via yesRamen.
After analyzing the numbers below, I'd say: probably not yet. But I’m still optimistic about the platform's potential.
Here are some stats from the past month:
- Unique visitors: ~600
- New signups: ~60 (surprisingly high)
- Feedback responses collected via yesRamen: 20 (by 15 people)
- For yesRamen: 10
- For other products: 10
- New products submitted: 8
I'm extremely grateful to the people who provided valuable feedback to the makers who posted their products.🙏
To incentivize more people to provide feedback, I implemented the following changes to the platform:
- Feedback grading system and leaderboard
- Feedback givers can now earn points and climb the leaderboard by providing quality feedback.
- Feedback giver profile page
- Feedback givers can now customize their profile and link to their social profiles and projects.
- Landing page redesign
- I've made the landing page more engaging and motivational to encourage more people to participate.
- Streamlined feedback workflow
- I've simplified the feedback input process and added an autosave feature so that people can return to their feedback later if they need to.
Additionally, I've added some other features and improvements, including a backend for makers to edit their feedback requests, a weekly digest for people who want to be notified when new products are added, and improvements to the legibility of answers.
I'm committed to making yesRamen a valuable platform for indie makers to get quality feedback and improve their products. If you haven't yet checked out the new website, please visit yesRamen and give it a try.
If you have any feedback or suggestions on how I can further improve the platform, I’d love to hear from you.
Thanks for reading!
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Hey Gael, here is my 2 cents:
I understand yesRamen from the MAKER point of view:
=>It gave me value since people gave feedback on Poked, and thank you for that. But I never came back on the site until today (it's looking better btw, congrats!).
But I don't get enough value as a REVIEWER right now.
- I see you have discounts... But if I'm honest, I don't care about discounts on super small products that no one uses (mine included). Nor do I care about skipping a totally made up "wait list".
=> I would care if I had a free forever lifetime acces. For instance, the screenshot tool you have is useful to me, but I wouldn't pay for it, and I dont' care about 2mo discount, I'm cheap af. But as a maker, I would be ready to give a limited amount of lifetime accesses to our (LinkedIn CRM, Poked)[https://www.pokedhq.com), in exchange for useful feedbacks.
- They are many products that I don't care about on yesRamen! I don't have a Tesla, nor do I have foreign language anxiety.
=> Starting a marketplace is super hard and you'll have to do a lot of things that don't scale. You'll have to send me many DMs like you did today before I make an habit of coming by myself. But, if I start using a few products thanks to yesRamen, and I know I can get super early products for free forever there, I will tell about it to other people over time. You can become like a PRE-AppSumo, and grow from there into an AppSumo competitor.
Loads of work ahead, but that's what'on my mind; Hope it helps!
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Hey Jules! Thanks for this super harsh-truth kind of feedback. That's what I'm here for.
- It did occur to me that the discounts are generally not very strong. I wanted the platform to be permissive and allow makers to try various combinations and see what works best (at the end of the day, they should care if they need feedback).
But yeah, no one has time to A/B test various feedback requests so I should probably enforce stronger incentives from the beginning by design (maybe min 1 year significant discount).
That being said, MagicShot is the tool that has collected the most feedback after yesRamen, in spite of that seemingly weak incentive. So that's not the only parameter that influences feedback.
- On the product selection, that's a big question of mine. Initially I imagined the platform would focus on tools that could be directly useful to indie makers (dev, marketing, analytics etc)
Rapidly I received requests for tools outside of this niche. The platform being new, and I, being hungry for more tools, was quite open to accept them. I'm still not sure whether that was a good decision though.
I certainly need to work on helping people find tools that are relevant for them more easily.
I'll have a closer look at what appsumo does.
Thanks again for this amazing comment.
Last but not least: Ok I'll send you more DMs :)
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That's just one feedback among many. Happy to chat in the DMz anytime!
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What a numbers! Congrats!
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These are nice changes, though I have to echo the comment that the value proposition for reviewers is still questionable. It's going to be a very tough not to crack. Anyone whose feedback I'd value likely wouldn't have the time or interest to provide it - even with these improvements.
Anyway, good luck! Great to see the momentum and I hope this helps.
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Thanks Cory!
Anyone whose feedback I'd value likely wouldn't have the time or interest to provide it.
I kind of agree but also not completely. I would say "most people" instead of "anyone". I think there are people whose feedback you'd value who would take the time to give it.
Some would do it for free, just because they're happy to help.
Some would do it for their reputation, some for a little reward.
Some would have done it for free but then they realized they would get something for it, and suddenly they're not so keen anymore...All that to say, I think it's a numbers and incentives game. It could work. Whether I have the resources to get the numbers and find the right incentives... Time will tell.
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Yup. The word "likely" was representing that narrow slice in my version. Agree they exist but they are quite rare.
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You have made some really nice changes on YesRamen! Well done Gael, keep up the good work 💪
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Thanks Gwendal :)
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I use YesRamen for one of my side projects.
The tool is really great! I highly recommend it!-
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Thanks Maxence :)
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Didn't want to make the post too long, but I feel like the following is important to point out.
All of the improvements I've made to the platform take root in one (or several) amazing actionnable feedback responses that I've received.
People who give feedback are amazing.
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We can see you implemented feedback, the site is looking better every weeks, kudos on that!!
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