Building the wrong thing

Hi all 👋

I have a question for you today: how do you build something people want, when you don’t really know your ideal customer profile yet?

That’s the biggest issue I had when I launched iacrea.

Here’s some context:
- I come from tech world, I used to be data scientist @ IBM
- My customers were real estate agents

I didn’t know their daily business life, their true needs. I just guessed what could be awesome for them.

But I quickly realized:

→ SaaS visitors often won’t tell something is not working
Because they need to find your email, leave the page they visit to open their mailbox to write you an email. It takes time, and the friction is high.

→ They don’t tell when you made something great
For the same reason as mentioned above.

→ And most importantly, what you think they need might be totally off
I built several features within IACrea that are (almost) never used.
I thought my customers would love it, but they don’t. And that’s super frustrating.

So I spent months chasing feedback.
I wrote messages in real estate group to find honest feedback, I contacted my users by emails and even by phone with some of them to be sure I understood their needs.

And this is super efficient. But it takes time and energy.

To spend less time doing this, Tarun and I built Feedbask: to remove frictions and get more feedback.

A dead-simple widget to capture:

✅ Feature requests & upvote
✅ Easy bug reports with all information from the reporter’s device
✅ Testimonials

Right where the user is, no need to leave the app.

(there’s even more capabilities with public roadmap, etc but that’s another story).

If you’re building, shipping, or iterating: try to get feedback as early as you can to avoid going in the wrong direction.
Use the method you want, call your customers, send them email or passively receive them through feedbask but start chasing feedback to avoid mistakes of building in the wrong direction.

Feedbask offers a free plan so no excuse, you don’t need to have a ramen profitable business to start listening to your users.

Should I dedicate a newsletter to explain the story on how I collaborate with other persons?

Let me know if you have any questions

See you soon 👋

Pauline