Every singlr one asked for a brand new complex integration. Instead of building them, I got on calls and asked why they needed them. Half of them just wanted to export data into a simple spreadsheet because our dashboard was too hard to filter. I spent a week adding a basic search and filter bar instead. All hundred feature requests disappeared. They weren't asking for new features. They were asking for a way to use what we already built.
How many things are you building that your users don't actually need?

I had a spreadsheet with every customer, every payment, every conversation. It was messy and manual and I complained about it constantly.

Then I moved everything to a proper tool. It took three weeks. And I lost something I did not expect.

We blamed the signup form. We blamed the pricing page. The real culprit was the empty state. Users logged in, saw a blank dashboard, felt overwhelmed, and closed the tab. I spent a weekend adding pre-populated sample data so they could see the product in action immediately. Day-one retention doubled. A blank screen tells the user nothing. A filled screen tells them everything.
What does your user see the very first time they log in?

It never happened to anyone who had been using the product for more than a week. Only new users. Only in their first session.

Took me two days to reproduce because I could not unlearn the product. I knew where to click. I knew what the buttons did. I moved through the app like someone who had built it, which I had.

I checked my metrics every morning. Every single day. Signups, revenue, churn, all of it.

At the end of the year I looked back and realized the daily check had changed exactly one decision. One. The other 364 days it just made me anxious and gave me something to react to before I had done any real work.

I changed two sentences on my signup page. Not the design, not the pricing, not the flow. Two sentences.

Trial to paid conversion went from 9% to 18% in three weeks.

I did not write a line of code for a month. I watched people use the product instead.

Ten sessions. Start to finish. No interruptions, no leading questions, no explaining what they were supposed to do.

I made something in two days. No plan, no strategy, no thought about whether anyone would use it.

It is still running four years later. Still getting messages from people who use it every week. Still the thing that brings people to my other work.