Merle Bennett's profile on Product Hunt

About

I am the Head of Projects at AMAKA Studio, a digital platform that showcases the best of African creative talent and culture through an online annual magazine. With over two decades of experience in producing photography, radio, TV, and digital content for advertising, I have a strong network of global creative talent and suppliers, as well as a keen eye for quality and innovation.

Badges

Tastemaker

Gone streaking

Gone streaking 5

Forums

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4d ago

My time zone assumption cost me a customer but I discovered this after six weeks

Our scheduled reports are sent out at 9am. This logic was written in a laptop configured to my personal time zone and never touched again.

One customer from Auckland got her weekly report at 10pm Monday night, and she needed it for her Monday standup. She didn t say anything about it. All I know is that she downgraded, and in the cancellation reason field there was "not quite right for us."

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5d ago

I removed a feature that only three people really liked but no one else did.

We shipped a "smart summary" panel in the spring of last year. Two weeks of effort, and many internal highs. When I checked the event log, 41 people out of a total of around 2,300 had viewed it twice or more. Removed it in March and waited for the complaints to start flooding in. Got one. From a friend.

It was not the wasted sprint that hurt. It was the realisation that I had created it not because it solved a customer need but rather because it worked well as a presentation for other founders to see.

Since then, my personal rule has been that nothing can ship unless three paying customers describe the same problem in their own words.

Have you killed something you loved dearly? How did you do it, and did anybody complain?

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20d ago

Can blogs actually improve Google rankings after the August SPAM update?

So I ve been doing blogs for a while for a number of companies and I used to find that following a nice frosty repeated across topics would work, to skip the boring bits I would essentially setup the following: - top 10 comparisons in the industry - COMPANY vs competitors at doing a specific job - best in the industry These would allow to jargon fill paragraphs on competitors, and be straight to the point and bullet lists for the company I want to improve so that AI can parse the content easier and also be cited more often Howver this doesn t actually help as much as it used to, and after the recent Google update it seems to have dropped effectiveness for around 70% any suggestions on how I can improve?