A few minutes ago, I read an overview of a report that more people take a source of news, not traditional outlets and media, but influencers. [I am attaching the screenshot from Reutersinstitute.]
TL;DR:
FB, YT, IG More attention is dedicated to news media/journalists
We kept building advanced dashboards because we thought power users wanted more depth. Turns out, new signups were getting lost in the setup process before they even hit their first 'aha' moment.
The realization hurt: nobody cares about our fancy analytics if they spend twenty minutes just trying to figure out where to click first.
For founders who have simplified their initial flow: what metrics did you use to measure whether your new onboarding actually reduced friction?
hey makers i recently wrote something a little more... different (at least for a b2b saas blog lol). i think product/startup wisdom often comes from unexpected places. one that i've been thinking about a lot recently is... Taylor Swift there's so many similarities between her and how startups operate and i think there's a ton of things we can learn from how she does business. check it out here and let me know what you think! are there any artists/celebs you think also operate like a startup? https://www.commandbar.com/blog/...
I spent my first week of marketing posting in builder communities, and made a few mistakes worth sharing.
I put a demo video inside a text post. The feed only previews the text, so the video only showed for people who clicked in. A media post shows the video right in the feed.
I wrote everyone who s given feedback so far when it was two people. Someone called it out within minutes, and they were right. Now I just say the number.
I expected builder communities to bring users. They gave me genuinely useful feedback, including the idea for my next feature, but no new installs. Everyone there is busy building their own thing.
What did your first week of distribution teach you? I m especially curious where your first users came from when they weren t other builders.
Every few months a new one felt like the fix. Each became the same problem: set it up, admire it, stop using it for the work. The common thread was never the software. I stopped switching and started finishing.
None of the apps were bad. I was avoiding the work and calling it optimization.
So for those who've cycled through tools: was it ever actually the tool's fault? And what are you setting up right now, hoping it'll finally make you do the thing?
Everyone focuses differently. And for a lot of people, where and how they work makes a huge difference.
Some need silence. Others need background noise. Some can t stand the cold, others lose focus if it s too warm. Coworking spaces? Only if they have the right vibe. Offices? Only if colleagues aren t interrupting every five minutes.
When we set up credits, one credit meant one generation. Easy to explain, and wrong.
A generation isn't one thing. The same request routed to a cheap model versus an expensive one can differ by an order of magnitude in what it actually costs us, and a retry after a bad output costs full price again. So a flat credit means the people doing simple work subsidise the heavy users, and the users you most want, the ones pushing the tool hard, are the ones losing you money.
It happened every Tuesday. Not Monday. Not Wednesday. Tuesday.
I spent three weeks trying to figure it out. Logs looked normal. Tests passed. The bug only showed up in production, only on Tuesdays, only for some users.
An unlimited plan was offered at $99 a month because simple pricing felt fair. One user processed over 50,000 API requests a day and cost $1,200 a month in cloud bills. When asked to move to a usage based tier they were furious: "The plan says unlimited." We were paying $1,100 a month for the privilege of having them as a customer. What's the pricing lesson you only learned after a customer broke the model you designed?
