Livia Bennett

It's a really weird feeling having a decent number of signups on paper but having zero clue what your actual ideal customer looks like. You look at your analytics and see one group living inside your app daily while another batch signed up months ago and never came back. When you're trying to design features for two completely different types of users at the same time you end up satisfying nobody.

Looking back do you wish you had niched down right from day one or is it better to cast a wide net early on just to see who sticks around?

We thought switching from usage-based pricing to flat monthly tiers would give our users "predictability." Instead, our signups dropped by nearly 35% in three weeks.

Small teams felt priced out before even testing the product at scale, while heavy users were getting a massive free ride and overloading our support channels. We tried to simplify our pricing page, but we actually destroyed the perceived value for entry-level buyers.

To anyone who has experimented with hybrid monetization models: how do you price for low-friction entry while ensuring heavy usage scales linearly with revenue?

This is such a real trap. When you share everything publicly you subconsciously start picking tasks that look flashy on a timeline rather than the boring bug fixes or database cleanup your app actually needs.

The vanity metrics feel good for a day but they distract you from the actual work. I stopped posting real-time stats and milestones completely for a while and my product velocity went right back up.

Do you keep a strict boundary between what you share on social media and what you work on behind closed doors?