How building every feature request is killing your business (and what to do about it).

One of the biggest mistakes I first made when I started building https://senja.io a year ago was immediately building every feature request I got. At the time, I was desperate for customers. So once I got a feature request, I would get started on it immediately and release it in a matter of hours to impress my users. It took me a while to realize it, but by doing this I started building a product that had no real focus. I would build features that didn't align with my product vision. Users would also make feature requests that often conflicted with each other. > To make matters worse, while I did impress the users I got, none of the users I did this for upgraded 😆 To regain control, and to build a product that my ideal users would love, I started democratizing feedback collection. I created a feature requests page where users could submit ideas for features they wanted, and other users could upvote on them. I'm using canny.io for this, but there are many feedback tools I know of, like upvoty.com and hellonext.co. I chose Canny because it's completely free to get started with. I added the link to the feedback page to my marketing site's menu and my app's dashboard, and slowly but surely, feedback from genuinely interested users started rolling in. When a user requests a feature in our support, we redirect them to our feedback page so that other users can vote on it. By doing this: - we now know which features our users want the most. - knowing what to build next is way easier - our users can also discuss with each other about how they want to use features.