How one piece of customer feedback shaped our product and marketing strategy for the next two years

This is article 2 of 8 in the Pivot Strategy Series. Hectic launched our web app in Feb 2021 and released an updated design in fall 2021. This series explores the research and decisions that influenced our updated design and strategy.

In the first article of the pivot strategy series, I wrote that MVP is about finding the strategy behind your product, and it might require building a product to get customer feedback to validate (or change) your strategy. After we released our web app in Feb 2021, we made it a priority to talk to the people who used our app. We often had to ask for feedback, but sometimes people gave unprompted feedback over Intercom after asking a question. One such piece of feedback went on to shape our product and marketing strategy for at least the next two years.

Before I get to that bit of feedback, I want to share a discussion the team had about two possible directions we could take the company.

The first direction was to be the best at everything we do. Hectic is an all-in-one platform that does proposals, project management, invoicing, time tracking, and a few other things. There are point solutions doing all of these and our customers were asking for features they could find in the point solutions that was missing from our all-in-one app. I wondered if it was ok to be a jack-of-all-trades with “good enough” features, or if people would want the best version of each feature. We could compete against these point solutions by focusing for several months on a single feature, making it the best in the world, and then moving on to the next feature. Rinse and repeat until all of our features are best-in-class, which would (hopefully) mean no more customers checking us out and leaving because “it’s good but what about [X feature] you don’t have?”

The other direction was to make the app even simpler. The target customer is a freelancer, independent creative, entrepreneur, or small team. What if we didn’t try to be the best version of every feature, but did provide the best all-in-one experience? Yes, there would be more robust versions of project management out there, but do our freelancers need that? Maybe they want something even simpler than what we already built. Rather than focusing on strengthening a single feature at a time and building the most robust version of each, and then piecing them all together, what if we simplified everything at once? More integrated data, simpler navigation, and fewer ways of doing things. We could add features to make the tools more helpful, but only if they would not add complexity to the app.

Now to the feedback. We had metrics showing our ratio of signups to daily active users to paid users. We had a lot more people sign up but never return than we had become a dedicated user. We received requests for features from people who would then never return after learning that a feature didn’t exist and would not exist for many more months (or never).

Those conversations were all short-lived. We also had a different kind of conversation with a few people, an energetic conversation where they raved about how much they love Hectic. And these people gave us a very different kind of feedback than the feature-seekers. Here are some quotes:

“I’m loving Hectic. It’s so fast and easy to use!”

“I feel like this app balances perfectly all the things a freelancer needs. It’s well organized, it doesn’t overload me with more information than I want or need, and it is enjoyable to use. I considered quite a few different options and I was stoked to find this one. Keep up the great work!”

(When speaking about the alternate apps in our space) “I have found a few that were ok but then they grew and kept adding more and more and it got to be too much.”

We decided to listen to the feedback from people who loved Hectic rather than people who tried it and left. That was a strategic choice. We could have said “they love it, so let’s leave them be and now focus on winning the people who left us,” but we wanted to build on our strength and not try to be everything to everyone.

So our strategy is to keep making Hectic simple. We want to be the easiest place to start, manage, and grow a freelance business. This applies to our product direction and to the new marketing ethos of “Freelance smarter.” We want to be the simplest solution for someone with very little time to quickly learn and then tackle a lot of work, not the most robust tool for a specialist.

And as a final thought, the people who gave us great feedback also gave us feature requests (many of which we built right away), so there is a balance between simplicity and robustness that we will strike. But how do we decide which features to build first? And how do those feature requests fit into the big picture of making our app simpler? To answer those questions, read the next article in the pivot strategy series: Will it move the needle? Using Product-Market Fit as our guiding light.

Photo by Jukan Tateisi on Unsplash