When a user asks for a new button or a custom dashboard, it's super tempting to just build it and make them happy. But half the time what they re asking for is just a band aid over a much bigger issue they re having with your app. If you just keep adding every requested feature your product becomes a bloated mess.
On the flip side if you question everything they say you risk sounding like you aren't listening to them. How do you decide when to just build what they asked for versus spending time investigating what's actually broken in their workflow?
In my case, I would say that the biggest failure was delaying the delivery date of a project by a month. The meeting following this mishap allowed us to identify what went wrong and why. Overall it was very constructive since it allowed us to pinpoint the issues that had gone wrong and how to prevent the same scenario from playing out in the future. Have you ever missed deadlines? How did you deal with it?
In a local Facebook group, people from my country had a pretty interesting discussion about how they justify charging a higher price for an output generated by AI.
Since AI came on the scene, we kind of expect the job to be done faster with less effort and the result is satisfactory. Does that mean the buyer has the right to ask for a lower amount?
Most of us start as a solo founder or bunch of cofounders. Who do you hire first, why, how and for what profile? I know it would be very specific to your startup. I am looking to hear your stories.
For the longest time my weekly dopamine hit was watching the signups counter tick up. I thought traction meant volume.
Then we started tracking 7-day and 30-day active usage, and the reality check was brutal. We were pouring water into a leaky bucket, celebrating every new registration while users slipped away silently within 48 hours.
For founders who survived this transition: what specific metrics or milestones forced you to stop celebrating signups and actually fix your activation loop?
I've been building for developers for four years, and the pattern I keep seeing in my own product and in every dev tool I've watched succeed or die is this: developers don't switch tools because the new one has more. They switch because the old one wasted their time in a specific, annoying way, and the new one removed that specific annoyance.
"More features" is what vendors think developers want. "Less friction in the exact place I'm already annoyed" is what actually drives adoption.
The corollary: every feature you add is a new thing a developer has to evaluate before trusting you. The best dev tools I use are the ones that resisted adding things.
So my claim is: in developer tools, feature count is a cost, not a benefit. Curious whether people agree or think I'm overstating it. And if you build dev tools. what's the one feature you deliberately refused to build, and did it help or hurt?
Building something, maybe also on your own sometimes makes it hard to celebrate and enjoy the things we've achieved along the way. How do you celebrate these things?
