Patrik
Two rules
- Calm company because I want to have a life
- Automate everything because I don’t scale
2nd batch of user invitations
We are still in ramp up phase, and selected 20 users from the waiting list and let them onto the product. The goal is to maximize user feedback on the current version of the tool without getting overwhelmed by too many requests at once.
We learned:
- this batch was much more price critical, conversion rate was lower than first batch. We probably need better expectation management that it’s a paid product.
- they loved the new UI, which is great feedback and reinforces our effort to move away from the excel-like input form
- they raised issues about missing features: missing cantons (we have only 60% coverage), retiring to a foreign country
- lots of questions about what the simulation does and can, a strong reminder that proper documentation is also a way to automate work
- Action items for us as we want to automate everything to be more scalable: create a demo of the product, collect all the answers to users into the product documentation (answer every question only once).
A fresh start
I finally finished a large refactoring of the simulation engine to move to proper accounting. As always, software accumulates a lot of technical debt over time and eventually rewriting instead of patching is the way to go to flush a lot of bad decisions taken before knowing all details. It really paid off to have a large test suite with unit and regression tests to make sure the refactoring didn’t break anything.
Marc
The build
We had a very good conversion rate on the first 10-20 clients we onboarded (thanks to you if you read this by the way!)
And when we wanted to onboard the next ones, the conversion rate really dropped and surprised us. So far, it seems due to two things:
- The first 10-20 clients were highly intentional and had been on the waitlist for a long time
- The latest users we asked to join, expressed their interest seeing the new design, but hadn’t (for some of them) the background story of our pricing and vision for the product
- So the key step we took (and which is still ongoing) is to provide more infos (i.e. screenshots), and improving our pricing page to be more clear on the value provided by FI Planner
- As Patrik said to me last week: all of this confirmed our choice of gradual Go-To-Market (GTM), so we didn’t make this mistake with 1'000 people but only 20-30, so now we can course-correct
The edge
At the moment, my discomfort comes from me not having enough time with my job, the blog, and FI Planner, and leaving a lot of the work to Patrik. But as we say to ourselves in such moments: we’re a Calm company. And that helps to relieve the self-pressure. But still, I’m looking forward to finding a better pace.
Note to a friend
Finally! That’s been since end 2024 that we wanted to start a “Founders’ Newsletter” for FI Planner, but we just hadn’t the time. Or didn’t take it. Whatever, celebrations!
If you start a startup today, I would recommend you kickstart such newsletter earlier so you don’t feel like us today, where we wanna share 2 years of learnings in one iteration.