Growing your product as an Indie Maker
How-To

As a developer/owner you have an existing product, an active customer base and you need to grow your product. But climbing up in user numbers seems a sheer endless journey.

With Productific you will always know what to build next: we help you creating a feedback community, collecting data to prioritize your product backlog and choosing the best new features and enhancements to build.

Growth comes from continuously improving and refining your core product. Your product improvements can be driven by A/B-testing, optimize your net promoter score or follow another process. Whatever you do, each development cycle will require you to prioritize a backlog and decide which feature to build next. Every new feature or product enhancement comes at a certain investment cost - while your capacity of building new stuff is not infinite. Your day only has 24 hours. So which new feature will you actually build? You need to make tough choices, prioritize your backlog and decide which feature is best to build next. With Productific you can automatically prioritize your backlog so you always know what to build next. Based on customer feedback data you can predict return for the various improvements ideas you have waiting in your feature backlog, your backlog always is a prioritized backlog.

Going from 10 to 100 and 1000

Your early customers are obsessed users. They use your product because it hits a sweet spot, even though it is (most likely) an immature product with glitches and gaps. Your 10th customer uses your product even though there are pain points because it provides value. Your 100th customer will be similar to your 10th customer - but blocked by the pain points. Your 100th customer will just need that little feature X improved in order to use your product.

Your 1000th customer will be like your 100th customer... you're faced with the challenge to prioritize feature requests according to what your customers need.

Talk about your product, tell everyone!

When built and shipped, every new feature needs to be communicated to active users and especially into the sales/marketing pipeline so new business can be attracted. Everyone should know about great new features in your product. After analyzing and building a new feature you usually describe the new capabilites in blogs, press releases and social media: you push a roadmap and changelog out into the world. Productific supports this job by automatically provisioning roadmap and changelog based on your original idea listings. It's easy to let your market know what's new and what's up next.

A tool to run your roadmap with 

To grow a product you capture new ideas from active users and find out about improvements and pain points. To find the most attractive ideas you collect feedback from your user group. Prioritizing such a feature roadmap is a complex and repetitive task. Tool support simplifies this task.

With Productific you can capture new ideas and choose the best features to build next. Better features will strengthen and grow your core product. The built-in roadmap and changelog help you spending less time on repetitive communication and more time on value work.

Find out more   Try Productific (free)