Issue #22: I felt overwhelmed šŸ¤Æ

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch

This has been an intense week. šŸ˜®ā€šŸ’Ø 

But hey!

ā

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch

A new release with a complete redesign of the UX, the first feedback from users, the first analysis of usersā€™ behavior, more competitors getting interested in the space, etc.

But letā€™s go in order! šŸ«” 

Table of Contents

What is an MVP?

In the indie community, many people are advocating for shipping as fast as possible even if the MVP is a crappy duck-taped solution with ugly UI and impossible UX.

I donā€™t know if itā€™s because Iā€™m part of the indie community, but it seems like solo founders are shipping more and more products, and the quality is often good from a UI/UX perspective. This means that being able to stand out from the crowd is harder, especially considering that itā€™s common to be building a product in the same space.

Probably the ability to get traction with a crappy MVP works well when you already have an audience. Thatā€™s probably a mix of trust and simply a matter of numbers.

Letā€™s define the conversion rate as the number of new customers over the number of users who saw a social media post describing the product. Letā€™s also make up some numbers where the conversion rate for a crappy MVP is 0.5% and for a polished MVP is 3%.

A founder with 100k followers shipping a crappy MVP, assuming that all of them see the post, would have 500 new users.

A founder with 1k followers, again assuming that all of them see the post, would have 30 new users. In the case of a crappy MVP, they would have been 5.

Iā€™m not saying that shipping crappy MVPs is a bad approach, but it depends on the circumstances. If you can have 500 users using your product with a crappy MVP thatā€™s awesome! Thatā€™s a great pool of customers you can take advantage of to make informed decisions on what matters the most moving forward! At the same time, your audience trusts you already!

But if you have only a pool of 5 customers itā€™s harder to say the same. You will either need to spend more time on marketing it and reach more people, or improve the MVP to increase the conversion rate.

Thereā€™s no silver bullet. šŸ˜… 

If you have no clue about what to do next in terms of product development, then itā€™s probably better to first reach out to more people rather than blindly pushing new stuff. But thatā€™s also quite some effort, especially if you donā€™t know who exactly your target is yet. On the other hand, if you still have some features youā€™re sure about, itā€™s probably easier to improve the MVP and increase the conversion rate.

Anyway, just my 2 cents. šŸ˜‚ 

A redesigned UX

Iā€™m very proud of this new UX! šŸ„³ 

When looking at the Reddit submissions, you want a quick way to evaluate what is worth engaging with. In the previous UX, each Reddit submission was taking up too much space. Most of the time you can see only one submission in the whole viewport of the browser. šŸ¤¦ 

The new UX fixes this by limiting the information in this listing to only what matters to decide whether it is worth it.

Once you decide that a submission is worth engaging with you start seeing all the details. This is implemented through a split-screen that allows users to drill down easily.

Split screen

To make users feel at home the whole UX and menu navigation has been inspired by how email clients.

Menu

How the score is calculated is also made more transparent and detailed by showing the breakdown:

  • relevancy: how closely does the submission's topic align with the problem your product solves?

  • compliance: how easy is it to engage without violating subreddit rules?

  • appeal: how likely is it that engaging with the submission will trigger interest and generate interaction?

  • reach: how big is the subreddit?

More transparent and detailed scoring

You can see it in action here!

Lessons from beta users and their usage

Having users means being able to work on feedback! šŸŽ‰ 

I didnā€™t get much feedback tbh, but by analyzing how they used the platform thereā€™s one thing that itā€™s super clear.

The onboarding is not smooth. šŸ˜¢ 

People are lazy, but thatā€™s fair enough, Iā€™m lazy as well. šŸ¤£ 

What I mean by this, is that by checking the projects created they often have names as ā€œtestā€œ and/or a very poor description. Iā€™d say that this is expected considering the following:

  • itā€™s currently free to use, which means that thereā€™s no real commitment yet

  • itā€™s not clear if, how, and why those fields would affect the tracking of submissions and the reply generation.

The problem is that they do. šŸ˜… 

The keywords are used as the first filtering step, and the description is used as the second filtering step to filter out false positives.

I have some ideas on how to make the onboarding smoother and reduce the effort required from sign-up to getting value from the platform.

Feeling overwhelmed

Ngl this week was tough, and a few times I felt overwhelmed. šŸ„µ 

Unfortunately, I sometimes tend to be anxious especially if I donā€™t sleep well or if Iā€™m particularly tired. The problem is that the majority of the time the reason why I donā€™t sleep well is because I cannot shutdown my brain thinking of work.

I also need to admit that this week I saw a newly launched competitor that was so polished that made me feel like shit. šŸ˜‚ 

Thatā€™s also one of the reasons why I wanted to revisit the UX. šŸ˜… 

For the new UX, I also had some fights with CSS in a way that I was not able to get help neither from ChatGPT, v0, etc., and I just needed to hack it and ship it. I fixed the UX at 1 am in the night. The new UX also required migrating all the previously analyzed submissions (almost 4k) to recompute the score according to the new criteria. I also sent a personalized email to each beta user according to what they did within the platform to get feedback.

Personalized emails to customers

All this context switch was quite taxing. On top of that, Iā€™m also always keeping an eye on my bank account. Itā€™s been a while since I saw some numbers written in green with a plus sign prefix. šŸ¤£ 

But as I said, ā€œThere ain't no such thing as a free lunchā€. šŸ’Ŗ 

Is HaveYouHeard the right bet?

Iā€™m bullish on HaveYouHeard. šŸ˜Ž 

Building products is getting easier, cheaper, and more accessible than ever. All the new AI tools are helping a lot even non-experienced people to have a chance to build their own business. However, marketing and distribution of a product still require a lot of work.

Who knows, maybe HYH could become the missing piece that would solve the problem of helping people with a product end-to-end (idea, implementation, distribution).

Conclusion

Iā€™m excited! This week was tough, but Iā€™m also very satisfied with how the product is evolving.

I have a lot of ideas and a specific list of things that Iā€™d like to have before moving away from the closed beta and pushing strongly on the distribution. šŸ”„ 

This week I also had the chance to speak with the CEO of a marketing agency specialized in Reddit and it was very insightful.

If youā€™re interested in following my journey, make sure to subscribe or follow me on X/Twitter and LinkedIn! 

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