Digesting feedback from early users

Our earliest product testers have been using our product for over a year now. Although we haven’t launched to the entire world it’s pretty cool to find out that we are already helping a few people manage their medications and vitamins. Here are snippets from a few of them.

My wife was one of our earliest product testers. She started taking prenatal vitamins and iron supplements after we found out that she was pregnant with our first child. Unfortunately, she sucked at remembering to take them. The easiest routine would be to take them in the morning when she was brushing her teeth. The problem was that her vitamins upset her stomach unless she ate first. It was too much work to rearrange her entire routine, but without doing this there was no “trigger” to remind her to take them.

She estimated she was taking them about 30–40% of the time based on how many were left after a few months.

We had a prototype ready for her about half way into her pregnancy. She began using it and she immediately started remembering to take her prenatal vitamins over 95% of the time. And she felt like she was in more control too. This was great!

We had another early user who was using Pillsy to manage her ADHD medications. She’d take one of her pills before she went off to her job as a software developer. What she said is that she liked the sense of control it gave her, particularly in making sure she didn’t accidentally take two doses in the morning, which could be even worse than forgetting.

Another user wanted to use Pillsy to manage his antidepressants. He didn’t provide as much detailed feedback other than he liked the sense of control, especially when it came to tracking side effects. He had been suspecting that his medication was causing sleeplessness but when he started tracking more carefully he realized it was probably not from his medication but from drinking coffee late in the day. He cut back on his coffee and things were okay. This person liked it enough that he asked us for another PillsyCap.

The final piece of feedback I’ll share is from a middle-aged woman who was using it to track Synthroid, which is a very common thyroid medication. Synthroid has a unique challenge associated with it, which is that it’s supposed to be taken in the morning, but you’re not supposed to eat for four hours after taking the drug. Using Pillsy made it much easier to track this automatically, so she could understand when it was time to eat.

It’s been encouraging to hear this type of feedback from our earliest users. These are the moments when you feel like staying up late or getting up early to keep cranking on things! It’s also exciting because there are a number of improvements we’ve made already and more that are on the way.

It’s also been incredibly interesting to learn about the different ways in which people are finding value in what we’ve made — it’s actually well beyond what I had initially anticipated based on my own experiences.

One of the themes that’s seemed to emerge is providing our users with a sense of having more control over their lives. It feels good to be able to give people this sense of control while also helping them out with their health.

Another them that may be emerging is that many of our earlier power-users and advocates are women. This is not something I expected, maybe because of the stereotype that early adopters of tech are more likely to be male. But at the same time tech is now everywhere. Pillsy is in many ways a modern version of a healthy lifestyle product. Or maybe it’s because men are not as concerned with taking care of their health. We’ll see if this trend continues as we continue to deliver our product to more people.

We’re excited to be able to start providing our product to more people soon. If you’d like to be an early user or if you have any other feedback based on the video, please let me know!