Why building everything your beta users ask for can secretly kill your product.
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In our early days, we built every single feature requested by our first 50 vocal users. We thought we were being super responsive and customer centric.
Turns out, we built a Franken app. Those exact users ended up leaving anyway because the core workflow got cluttered with niche requests that nobody else cared about.
How do you filter out the noise of loud feature requests without ignoring genuine product gaps?
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I'm kind of the opposite on speed. My clients' teams use my products every day, and I usually handle their requests the same day.
Where I hold back is copying competitors. I made my own calendar app because Fantastical's features didn't do it for me, and when I started thinking about adding what other calendars have, I could feel mine getting bloated too. For a calendar, being easy to read matters most, so I put the effort into the UI instead.
The filter that works for me: does this request make the main path longer for people who don't want it? In my app the main path is describe a song, pick a style, get the song. Things people asked for that don't touch that path, like lyric videos or printing the lyrics as a poster, live on the finished song screen, so whoever never wants them never sees them. Bigger ones, like singing in your own voice, went behind a flag in their own tab, so I could turn it off without a release if it confused people. Anything that would add a step or a choice before the first song gets a hard no, however loud the request.