Hey gang,

It’s been a while – after launching in September, the holidays came swiftly. That time was not wasted! During that period, I performed outreach to customers, asking for help smoke-testing the platform.

After approximately 2.5 weeks, I collected a few pieces of feedback that confirmed feature functionality and validated my engineering and launch strategy.

I also took this time to test a hypothesis surround communication and specifically, the way I communicate.

Communication

From prior experiences, I tend to provide too much context and detail when I answer questions or explain a concept to someone. When reaching out to customers, I wanted to ensure they could experience a normal onboarding process without getting caught up on things that weren’t important.

In this particular case, I wanted the users to focus on the core feature of my product, launching and using their own Nightscout server.

My hypothesis: Can I still get customers to test the product without going into too much detail and ask them to focus on specific areas?

In order to ensure ease of use and focused testing, I assembled an instruction manual in PDF form, that contained screen shots and callouts for the user to follow.

I know this shouldn’t be a surprise but it was a great reminder that when building, selling, or using a product, keep the message short and sweet:

• Click here
• Look here
• Wait.
• Perform this action (preferably with with an image)

In the same vein, the instructions were very concise and focused when probing for feedback, complete with contextual links to return the feedback or report any issues.

I have to constantly remind myself that everyone is hammered with information and text every day – the last thing they want is some wall of text sharing context they don’t need to know or care about. And with this longer post, I appreciate you indulging me if you’ve kept reading!

Updates

On to updates!

In this current phase of the project, I’m focused on:

• Shipping one more critical feature (user settings), this feature spans both UI and back-end work and I have estimated at 1 week’s worth of time.
• Customer acquisition / marketing.
• Finishing up the last steps for incorporation and getting banking set up.

I’ll be slowly shifting away from engineering work and more towards business growth and selling. I had wanted to hire a contractor to begin working on that last UI feature but I found that shipping this last feature set is a good stopping point for any further engineering work.

My short-term goal is to ship the feature by mid-Feb and then really focus on putting a marketing campaign together to acquire users. Longer term, by spring time, I hope to have my first paying customers.

It’s been an adventure so far but aside from talking about the product, it’s time to get back to building.

All the best,

Jonathan