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Building a Startup completely in the Open

Danielle on December 24, 2018

The importance of user feedback and community support before launching a new product is huge. Users are full of surprises, it's long been establish...
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Jason C. McDonald • Edited

Great to see the process, and all the best to y'all!

One potential problem I see down the road: design by committee. Even if the committee is your user base, that can still be a problem. Similarly, how do you handle feedback overload? How will you handle making decisions as your user-base grows, where you cannot factor in everyone's feedback? How do you maintain a centralized vision, instead of something designed by five hundred different people?

(Historical context: Minecraft was developed in the open by Notch, and he incorporated a lot of people's ideas before starting Mojang. Now, they get flooded with feedback, and have to ignore most of it.)

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Danielle

Hey Jason! Thanks for a great comment, it made me think!

Right now we haven't yet reached feedback overload. We'll keep asking for feedback from the maker communities which will remain moderately small and keep questions on social media to something easier to manage like polls. I also anticipate more A/B testing with some marketing to drive people to the website.

I'm not sure if we want a completely centralised vision. We knew the features the product needed to get off the ground, but now we're not the ones driving the future of it - our customers are. So we've created a public roadmap where people can suggest and vote for the next feature.

We've built several apps in the past which have not been a success because we built what we thought users wanted instead of asking them. For Leave Me Alone we want the users to be the driving force behind the app. And I may regret it but I hope we grow enough to be flooded with feedback!

Thank you again for the comment :)

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Danielle

This comment made me think there must be a better way to allow people to give feedback...

So I've just released a new version with better way for people to give feedback leavemealone.xyz/feedback and report a bug leavemealone.xyz/bugs - they're both Airtable forms!

What do you think?

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rhymes

Hi Danielle, this post is great as is your approach. A public roadmap and maybe a direct line to the beta testers seems like a good way to steer the product, even when you'll grow so much you won't possibly be able to answer to everyone.

Good luck and thanks for sharing!

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Danielle

Thank you! Haha I can only hope we'll grow too much :P

Yesterday I added a way to provide feedback and report bugs directly from our website at /feedback and /bugs

These go into an Airtable spreadsheet for sorting out (feature requests to the roadmap, and issues onto our bug tracker). Hopefully this method will keep it easy to manage as we grow!

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Ben Halpern

Absolutely fabulous look into your process. Now it's time to put in the long hard work of refining and refining and refining.

Great to have you in the community Danielle.

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Danielle

Thank you Ben! Absolutely, the grind starts now haha

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Akash Kava

Why on gmail? Why don’t you develop a mail server extension service instead , dependency on Gmail is bad. The way Gmail is now controlling third party access to mailbox is really concerning.

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Danielle

Gmail is the mail provider that myself and James use and we were testing and solving the issue for ourselves first. Google have recently made it more difficult to get API usage approved; we had to record videos of the sign in process and justify why we wanted the read email scope etc which I think is a good thing :)

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Akash Kava

Is it good thing? Gmail will completely control your users !! and your business in a way, how is it good thing? I would not want to show google how software works with user's emails, it is not Google's property, emails belong to users.

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Danielle

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Our users already use Gmail, we just built a service to help them clean their inboxes. We'll support other providers eventually :)

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Shiraaz Moollatjie

This is a really great article Danielle! Quick question, do you always approach your idea validations with landing page websites or was it something used just for this application?

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Danielle

We didn't used to but we would spend time building something that no one wanted! Now we try to validate the idea first by building a landing page, getting people to join an early access mailing list, and tweeting about it :)

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ADONIS SIMO

Am asking myself !! could this tool remove my dev.to subscription ?

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Danielle

Haha yes it could! However, one of the features we'll be working on next year is a "keep list" of subscriptions you don't want to unsubscribe from. We have a public roadmap where you can vote for what we work on next leavemealone.xyz/roadmap - the keep list is currently winning!

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ADONIS SIMO

Nice. Is it possible to join your team ?

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Danielle

It's just my partner and myself at our company right now, we don't have the resources for any more right now, sorry!

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ADONIS SIMO

Nice approach !! it make me think of slack's launching approach : OPENED , community oriented. Thank for sharing this amazing story !!!

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Danielle

Thank you so much! I'm so glad you enjoyed reading 😊

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Liana Felt (she/her)

Fabulous story

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Danielle

Thank you for reading Liana!

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Danielle

Thank you Jag! That's what we were hoping for :) - we've built too many things in the past that were code first, market later and they did not work out so well!