Every singlr one asked for a brand new complex integration. Instead of building them, I got on calls and asked why they needed them. Half of them just wanted to export data into a simple spreadsheet because our dashboard was too hard to filter. I spent a week adding a basic search and filter bar instead. All hundred feature requests disappeared. They weren't asking for new features. They were asking for a way to use what we already built.
How many things are you building that your users don't actually need?

We blamed the signup form. We blamed the pricing page. The real culprit was the empty state. Users logged in, saw a blank dashboard, felt overwhelmed, and closed the tab. I spent a weekend adding pre-populated sample data so they could see the product in action immediately. Day-one retention doubled. A blank screen tells the user nothing. A filled screen tells them everything.
What does your user see the very first time they log in?

I checked my metrics every morning. Every single day. Signups, revenue, churn, all of it.

At the end of the year I looked back and realized the daily check had changed exactly one decision. One. The other 364 days it just made me anxious and gave me something to react to before I had done any real work.

It never happened to anyone who had been using the product for more than a week. Only new users. Only in their first session.

Took me two days to reproduce because I could not unlearn the product. I knew where to click. I knew what the buttons did. I moved through the app like someone who had built it, which I had.

I did not write a line of code for a month. I watched people use the product instead.

Ten sessions. Start to finish. No interruptions, no leading questions, no explaining what they were supposed to do.

I changed two sentences on my signup page. Not the design, not the pricing, not the flow. Two sentences.

Trial to paid conversion went from 9% to 18% in three weeks.

Relying on memory to summarize product updates always led to rushed incomplete changelogs. Moving that habit directly into the dev process changed everything for us.

Documenting each user acing change while it's fresh makes the notes way more accurate. Plus if a change is hard to explain in one simple sentence it's usually a warning sign that the feature itself is messy.

We price in credits. One credit is ten cents. Looks clean until you put two models side by side.

A 30 second 1080p clip is 90 credits on one video model and 513 on another. Same output spec, 5.7x the price. Credits were supposed to make cost legible and they do the opposite, because nobody carries a mental conversion rate. The number on the button is noise, so people find out what a generation costs after they have spent it.

I made something in two days. No plan, no strategy, no thought about whether anyone would use it.

It is still running four years later. Still getting messages from people who use it every week. Still the thing that brings people to my other work.

Just yesterday I prevented my team from adding an exotic feature to our product.

My hypothesis is that people don't like many features in a product as that complicates the product adoption e.g. many sales guys hate CRMs for this reason. In that sense, more features might equate to no features as users don't adopt/use the product. So, minimalistic products that solve 1 big problem (80% of the problem pie) is what people like.

That's what I think.