Open Startup Report - August '24
No one noticed this feature didn't exist
It took me two years to build one of the features for PriceWell. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t actually working on it for two years. Actually, I wasn’t working on it at all. I had the idea for A/B testing for pricing pages might be useful, so I added it to the marketing site from day one. BUT, the feature never existed.
My logic was to only build the feature when customers (or potential customers) were actually demanding it. Over the course of two years, I had a few enquiries about the capabilities of the A/B testing feature. Each time I noted down what they were interested in and responded with something non-committal like “the feature doesn’t do that right now, but it’s on our roadmap“.
I finally felt like there was enough interest at the beginning of 2024 and started building the feature. I built it slowly in the few spare hours I had each week. Finally in August, it was ready to release. I’d just had another enquiry about it so I put it live, updated the landing page with screenshots and…. crickets. Not a single person used it.
Bread maker features
There are some features that everyone wants, but no one uses. At a company I worked for there was a an addon that was asked about on every sales call. When we looked at the numbers, literally no one was using it.
A reddit user hits the nail on the head
It’s our job as founders to detect these features (books like The Mom Test help here) and put off building them or put minimal effort into the MVP. This depends on which category they fall into from the Reddit post above.
Feature checklists = Don’t build it
Comply with legal requirements = Build it
Impress stakeholders = Don’t build it
Win/keep a client = Build it with minimal effort
The problem is it’s very tempting to build features especially if customers are telling you they need them. It’s easy to get into that builders momentum where you feel like you are making progress by building features.
Building features ≠ Progress to Product Market Fit
Lost Signups
We get decent monthly traffic from Google and other sources at PriceWell now. I see new users signing up every day but very few use the account or schedule a call (we have a prominent calendly link during onboarding). Some of them are obvious spam (gmail accounts) but others are legit companies.
I often wonder what they are expecting from signing up. I’d love to get insight into what they were trying to do. They were invested enough to give their name and email address but then nothing…
To be continued