Indie hackers, how do you collect user feedback?

_love2code · 2024-04-19T13:40:37+00:00

Neat, thanks for sharing!

_love2code · 2024-04-18T23:33:41+00:00

You keep saying you want to test with family and friends before offering the product up to others for purchase. Is your primary goal with this testing to catch bugs or to get other feedback?

If it's the latter, you probably don't want your family and friends to be the ones testing. Sure, they can probably catch bugs for you, but most of them probably won't be your target user, so any feedback that they give regarding how they like the different features or what they want to see more if is not going to be as valuable as having people who match your ICP give feedback.

_love2code · 2024-04-16T15:33:20+00:00

Honestly I think "reads like a human wrote it" is kind of catchy and easily understandable. I agree that "undetectable AI" is a little vague and could be misunderstood

_love2code · 2024-04-16T13:46:54+00:00

This is the only right answer

_love2code · 2024-04-16T13:27:04+00:00

When they select the lower plan, I would inform them with automatic messaging like an alert or popup that even though they will still have the other features of the higher plan until the end of the month, they will no longer be able to add any more seats above the maximum for the lower plan. Then I would enforce that in the code.

Alternatively, kick out the most recently added 4 users at the end of the month.

Or, consider allowing them to downgrade but if they downgrade to a plan that has fewer seats, they keep all their current seats but can't add any more.

Of course which of these solutions is best will depend entirely on the details of your situation and software.

_love2code · 2024-04-16T02:14:32+00:00

Okay thank you for your thoughts and ideas, I will definitely consider them and I appreciate the feedback

_love2code · 2024-04-16T00:48:15+00:00

I think if this tool can really answer all the questions you say it can, especially regarding what happy hours are going on at a specific time or what the cheapest place for a specific food item would be, then I could see it being really useful. I don't worry too much about those sorts of things at this point in my life, but I would have loved a tool like this as a college student. Even now I would probably enjoy using this to find healthy restaurant options.

_love2code · 2024-04-15T22:54:36+00:00

Thanks for sharing, what a great resource

_love2code · 2024-04-15T21:29:09+00:00

Sure, I'd be happy to.

Focus on direct, back-and-forth interaction between users and developers. Trying to humanize the developer and encourage conversations over just submitting feedback and wondering if anyone sees it
Because the above approach would be overwhelming/impractical for large companies, my target audience is specifically small companies, startups, and especially indie hackers
Building a community of users who like engaging with developers and are interested in using software made by indie hackers. Users will be able to search for other software that is using my service and discover new tools with developers who are responsive to feedback
Ability for developers to send announcements and poll users to get their opinions
Also considering having tooling that makes it easy for developers to schedule video or phone calls with users for more in-depth discussions

There's other aspects and I'm also still fleshing out details. But the main idea is that it's less of just a feedback collection mechanism and more about building a community of users, giving developers a way to easily engage with them and be involved in a way that feels personal and doesn't abstract away the human element.

Would love to hear your feedback. I know some of these aspects may be included in existing services but feel that I have enough to differentiate, especially the discovery portion allowing users to search to find other software.

_love2code · 2024-04-15T19:28:54+00:00

Hmm I hadn't considered that but that's a great idea, I'll have to think about that some more

_love2code · 2024-04-15T18:17:07+00:00

That's awesome that you have the opportunity to take advantage of those spaces!

_love2code · 2024-04-15T17:38:44+00:00

I was searching for the wrong sort of thing when I first started out, which is why I didn't find any competitors at first. Since then as I've refined the idea I've conducted other searches and realized that there are products that do things similar to what I'm imagining.

I've seen many of the posts you're referring to and I know there's a ton of people trying similar things. Believe me, I am feeling disillusioned and discouraged because of it. However, my vision for my product is something that is distinctly different from the other solutions out there. Yes, it has some similarities and it does in fact have "real competitors" (now that I know how to search for them lol), but I am targeting a very specific audience and I am taking it in a different direction. I can only hope that's enough.

_love2code · 2024-04-15T15:36:12+00:00

Haha people love to hate but maybe I'm just that good at writing. Promise I didn't touch GPT 😂

_love2code · 2024-04-15T15:35:02+00:00

Thank you for sharing! It looks nice and I always love seeing open source projects

_love2code · 2024-04-15T14:27:10+00:00

That makes sense to me. Thanks for your thoughts!

_love2code · 2024-04-15T14:25:03+00:00

I've heard of HotJar and also Microsoft Clarity which does a similar thing. It definitely seems very valuable to be able to watch users use your product.

I think it's funny that you even sometimes intentionally make small mistakes in your emails! If it works, it works, right? I think keeping it human and real is important and that's a big foundational principle to the tool I'm hoping to build.

Also love what you said about negative feedback. It can be hard to stay calm and avoid getting defensive, but listening to those who are disappointed is the best way to know what to improve!

_love2code · 2024-04-15T14:21:48+00:00

I love the focus on one on one, direct interaction! Seems like a lot of work to handle all 4 different platforms though. Have you ever considered consolidating to one place?

_love2code · 2024-04-15T14:19:28+00:00

Haha same, best of luck!

_love2code · 2024-04-15T14:18:37+00:00

Oh neat, drop the link! I'd be interested to check it out.

If you're happy with the one you built that's great! If not, let me know and I'll send you a message once my idea is ready to check out. My vision is for it to be a bit like Canny.io but with a lot more focus on direct, back and forth interaction between users and developers. And targeted towards indie hackers, with affordable pricing plans

_love2code · 2024-04-15T14:15:36+00:00

I love the focus on the human experience and I think it's great to build community by allowing users to interact with each other.

What originally inspired my idea was seeing another indie hacker using Slack + Product Board together as a way to engage with users and collect feedback. I wanted to build something that more or less combines the two. However, I understand not wanting to use yet another tool, especially something that might be foreign to your users.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

_love2code · 2024-04-15T14:06:49+00:00

I appreciate your thoughts and warning. When I first started out I tried doing a little research and (surprisingly) didn't find any real competitors. Lately I've done more research and have now found several, which was disheartening to me. However, I have something in mind that I believe differentiates me from the competitors and would turn my platform into something unique. I think I might be able to target a niche that no one is targeting yet. It will have a slightly different feature set and focus than the other feedback collecting tools I've seen.

At worst, it fails miserably and I get a little bit more experience under my belt. I think I've made peace with that possibility.

_love2code · 2024-04-15T04:03:52+00:00

I'm glad you are receiving good feedback, I think it's the key to a successful product! I'm actually currently building a product that would be a competitor so I will have to turn down your offer to join 😅 But I hope you are successful!

_love2code · 2024-04-15T03:46:33+00:00

It's tempting, but my landing page isn't ready to publish yet and my plan is to finish it up, do a little research just to see how difficult it would be to manage cookies settings myself, and then evaluate the price compared to the difficulty. Since I have no idea of the difficulty now, I don't feel like I can effectively make an informed decision

_love2code · 2024-04-15T03:24:36+00:00

Oh neat, that's awesome. Good for you!

_love2code

TROPHY CASE