I love social software and interesting data.
I'm 27. I love cooking and trying new food.
I live in Brooklyn, NY Bayonne, NJ.
Contact me at david.lifson@gmail.com.
I'm the co-founder of Postling, a unified dashboard for small businesses.
It's important to me to give back to the startup community, so if you are interesting in hearing my thoughts about your startup, sign up for my office hours or send me an email.
My other sites:
Have you ever collected feedback from your customers with, like, your ears?
“By now we had also heard of the merits in listening to your users and decided to follow a release early/release often model. The only problem was we didn’t know how to listen. In the interest of efficiency and productivity, I generally avoided face to face meetings and phone calls and preferred email. Many people were struggling with the software (desktop apps are hard) but we didn’t know how to engage them. After they’d cancel their account, we would send them an email to learn why but many times it was too late.
“We were getting a lot of feedback over email but didn’t know the best way to qualify them. If more than one person asked for a feature and it sounded like a good idea, we built it. The reverse was also true, if the feature didn’t meet our model of “the vision”, we ignored it no matter how many people asked for it. And that’s how we kept busy for a while till I realized we still had a lot of leaky buckets despite all the listening we were doing.
“Determined to get to the bottom of this, I got an 800 number which I put on our website and also started calling on users directly. The findings were staggering. Most of our paying users were using a very small percentage of the application. We had built up a lot of bloated features or waste which had only taken time to build but also continued to create ongoing work with regression testing, feature dependencies, etc.
