Thanks for sharing. I really enjoy your writing style by the way.
I'm interested how the "raising prices to avoid feature requests from people who wouldn't become a customer anyway" worked.
I have built something for a friend of mine who is now my first customer. The tool solves a niche problem some of his peers struggle with too.
When building it, I tried to make the data models as generic as possible so that other businesses would be able to use the tool with a minimum of effort from my side.
Of course, I still foresee a lot of feature requests. How do/did you know zestful had the right basic functionality and feature-set for it to be useful to customers?
In other words, how did you separate the must-have features from the nice-to-have ones (knowing that a must-have for a particular person could very well be a nice-to-have for the market)?
To preface, I'm definitely not an expert at this problem, because Zestful still only has a handful of customers, but I can tell you what was helpful for me.
It is really hard to separate the nice-to-haves from the must-haves. Some customers will present their nice-to-haves as if they're must haves because they suspect that if they don't make it sound like a condition of buying, you'll never implement it, but they might buy anyway. Or they'd never buy regardless.
One of the features that I think I correctly took on this year was linking Zestful's ingredients to USDA entries. A lot of customers either explicitly asked for that feature or for something similar. Later large customers cited that feature as something that made them choose Zestful, so I'm glad I added it. I think the signal there was the high proportion of customers asking for it.
I think it is powerful to offer to implement that feature based on pre-payment of X months of service. It might drive away customers who don't feel comfortable letting you hold their money, but if your time continues getting burned by customers who request features and don't follow through, it's a good technique to keep in your back pocket.
I'm interested how the "raising prices to avoid feature requests from people who wouldn't become a customer anyway" worked.
I have built something for a friend of mine who is now my first customer. The tool solves a niche problem some of his peers struggle with too.
When building it, I tried to make the data models as generic as possible so that other businesses would be able to use the tool with a minimum of effort from my side.
Of course, I still foresee a lot of feature requests. How do/did you know zestful had the right basic functionality and feature-set for it to be useful to customers?
In other words, how did you separate the must-have features from the nice-to-have ones (knowing that a must-have for a particular person could very well be a nice-to-have for the market)?