Your first 100 users don't want what you think they want
Six months ago I shipped FillTheTimesheet, a time-tracking app for freelancers and agencies. The pitch in my head was gorgeous: automated tracking, smart categorization, AI-assisted client billing. I was going to obsolete manual timesheets.
The first 30 users shrugged at the AI categorization. Nobody mentioned the automation. What they kept asking for was a Friday afternoon reminder. Just a nudge to fill in the week.
That was the feature I almost didn't build. I thought it was too simple.
Lesson 1: users don't want "smart." They want "reliable."
The feedback I kept ignoring was that freelancers weren't forgetting to categorize. They were forgetting to log anything at all. My fancy automation solved a problem my users didn't have. A push notification at 4:30 PM on Friday — that was the product.
I rebuilt the onboarding around one promise: we'll make sure your timesheet is never empty. Activation doubled.
Then I did it again with PromptShip
PromptShip is a shared prompt library for non-technical teams — marketing, sales, HR, customer support. The kind of teams where someone in the group uses ChatGPT brilliantly and everyone else is squinting at the output.
My V1 had version history, diff viewing, A/B tests on prompts — a whole prompt IDE. You know who asked for any of that? Zero users.
What they asked for, over and over: "can I just copy a good prompt into ChatGPT with one click?"
That's it. That's the feature. That's the whole product.
Lesson 2: the obvious version of your product is what users actually want
Founders compete with each other. Users don't care. They want the obvious thing done well and done reliably.
I rebuilt PromptShip's homepage around a single sentence: Save your best AI prompts. Use them anywhere. Signups went from 3 a day to 30.
The features I stripped out? I still have them. They're still useful. But they're not the product. They're the cherry on top after you've convinced someone that the sundae itself is good.
What I'd tell a founder shipping their first SaaS today
- Your first 10 users will tell you exactly what to build. Shut up and listen.
- If your top requested feature feels too boring to build, that's the feature.
- "Obvious" is not "already built." Execute better on the obvious thing and you have a product.
- The 20th-percentile user is your customer. Not the power user who finds your feature tree clever.
Both products — FillTheTimesheet and PromptShip — are healthier now because I stopped trying to impress the wrong audience. Specifically, my wrong audience was other founders. Users were telling me the truth. Took me a while to hear it.
Building both in public at gorinsystems.com.
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