@rrhoover Thanks for the kind words! I remember sending you some early episodes back when we did our alpha last November. You also might be the first person to ever make cheesy sound good. Less whiz, more Gouda. That said, we've learned a ton that might be interesting to some, or obvious to others, i'd say my personal takeaways: 1. While there is content everywhere, a lot of it looks the same. I encourage new co's / founders to really think about why users won't associate their output with everyone elses. We spend a ton of time making sure we don't look like everything else out there (D2C especially) because that stuff just makes customers overlook the actual product and just assume "Oh, this is just like a Casper for _____." 2. We talk to our users everyday, we actually have a company phone that people can text and talk to someone on. For our first 300 users we used an iMessage rig on an iPad, hooked up to co phone line. However blue bubbles don't scale (please correct me if they do or you know how to make them to!) So now we use something more automated, but are constantly posing questions and getting feedback. You can look at user behavior data but sentiment is best received through some pretty basic questions, just takes a little extra time. Totally worth it and when you see common patterns it really tells you what you should start building next. 3. My last takeaway and probably most important thing is that you have to make your product magical. Like literally, people should be blown away by it upon the first experience. You should be excited to tell someone how much you love or even hate something, it will make for network effect and in the beginning people will think you are crazy for doing some stuff but its what is required to dent the universe of the app store. Hopefully this is helpful, I know sometimes these things are broad or vague, i'm around all day and can answer some Q's here!

Ryan Hoover

Product Hunt

I've enjoyed following DTS over the past ~year. It's refreshingly cheesy. What's been the biggest learnings o far, @maxhellerstein and team?

6yr ago

Maximillian Hellerstein

DTS

Maker