I'm a first-time founder and recently launched my first product. I keep finding myself switching between improving the product and trying to get users.
Looking back, what do you wish you had done differently before reaching your first 100 users? More product? More marketing? More conversations with users?
We built Protocall five years ago, used it internally every day since. But when we decided to launch, we knew there were still plenty of things to fix and add. So we had two options:
Don't launch and spend another year making it great on our own, going only off internal team and client feedback.
Find people who'd actually share their feedback and help us get there much, much faster.
One decision I went back and forth on for a long time: whether to add rewards for testing and feedback, or just ask people nicely.
Since testing a product properly, reporting a bug that's actually reproducible, or writing up an idea that's usable looks like real work. It's literally someone's job internally, our product owner and QA engineers get paid to do exactly this. Asking strangers to do the same thing for free felt like asking a favor we wouldn't ask of our own team without paying them. So we set up a small pool: $10 to $200 per contribution.
Are you totally against sharing your personal data to companies? or are you neutral and think your info doesn't matter that much? Not just words from dictation apps, but other personal details like schedules from a productivity app, or computer details from coding agents. Asking this cause I personally don't mind my app data being sent to companies, as long as they're not passwords, or important personal info. But this brings us to another question, where is the line?
