Ethan L.'s profile on Product Hunt

About

I’m a forward deployed software engineer at Palantir Technologies and a recent graduate from the University of Maryland with a degree in Computer Science and minor in Creative Writing. I'm deeply interested in the areas of computer vision, drone production, and machine learning, as well as API development and application. Exploring these areas excites me as they open opportunities to create meaningful impact through technology, and I am particularly intrigued by the overlap between these fields.

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Tastemaker

Gone streaking

Gone streaking 5

Forums

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6h ago

Nobody told me how churn changes when you start to have actual paying customers.

Before we started monetizing the product and had paying customers, I would be consumed by new sign-ups. Every time my dashboard refreshed and there was another customer in the CRM, it was confirmation that everything worked as planned. However, now that we have started billing our customers, I realized how much worse it feels to see somebody cancel their subscription three weeks after using the product than seeing somebody not signing up from the start.

This realization forced me to really read through the feedback left when people canceled their subscription, and it turns out that most of the cancellations don t stem from lack of features. Instead, it s about not having a product fit their workflow, which is a harder problem to solve than just adding something into the changelog.

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1d ago

Rather than go through the competitor’s changelog, I used their product for a month.

I kept an Excel of what the three closest competitors shipped out. It gave me no insights whatsoever. The feature name in the list doesn't say anything about its quality.

In July I tried the closest competitor out by purchasing their product and using it for a month in a serious work context. Three things happened:

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2d ago

Churn happened due to 24 hours clock

This is something that I have seen happen to another creator and it struck close to home for me. We had our timestamps being displayed in the browser locale, except for one export, which always displayed ISO timestamp as I coded this feature at 1am and never got back to it after that.

A person who works as an accountant in [country] canceled and said just one line about this in the exit survey.

One line of code. Many months of this feature quietly pissing people off without telling me.

I now maintain a list of "features I hardcoded when tired" and review them monthly. The list is longer than I'd like to admit.