How much can one helpful customer shape your software product with their feedback?
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A lot - if you let them.

To gather material for our book, we've been conducting interviews with software founders. An unexpected result of these interviews? They've helped me better understand my own journey while building Feature Upvote.

For example, the story of Simon from Canada reminded me of how much help we received from Ruben from Spain.

In our interview with Bridget Harris from YouCanBookMe, she told us how, in the early days, their team was greatly helped by "Simon from Canada".

Similarly, I was helped in the early days of Feature Upvote by one person for whom our product was exactly what he needed: Ruben from Spain.

My case was a little different though - Ruben was both an early customer and part of our team. Every morning, he worked with me for four hours as a part-time employee, designing and testing Feature Upvote's latest improvements. Then, in the afternoons, he worked with his three co-founders on a video game.

When it was time to launch their game, Ruben wanted to use Feature Upvote to as the sole means of handling player feedback and bug reports.

At the time, Feature Upvote was still in private beta. This was an amazing opportunity to see if our goal - to create a simple way for users to suggest and vote on ideas - would actually work in practice.

Secretly, I was thrilled by Ruben's request. It was a vote of confidence in what we were building. But I was also surprised; I had intended for Feature Upvote for small software companies. I didn't understand how a game studio could use our tool effectively. But Ruben did.

Ruben's game really took off. Like, really took off.

His team soon started receiving an overwhelming amount of player feedback every day. As the "community manager" for their game, Ruben struggled to keep up.

Ruben would come into work, show me a pain point he was experiencing with Feature Upvote, and ask if we could fix it. And, of course, we did.

Whatever Ruben requested became our top priority, because his ideas weren't hypothetical. They were based on real-life pain.

I don’t remember every single change we made based on Ruben’s feedback, but as best as I recall, most of the improvements focused on streamlining the UX to handle large amounts of feedback more effectively.

It's one thing to think you are building a product with good UX. It's another thing entirely to use it every day, in real-world conditions, stumbling over confusing areas and getting frustrated with the "rough edges".

Years have passed since those early days working with Ruben from Spain, but the impact is still clear.

Through word of mouth alone, Feature Upvote spread through the video game industry as a way to manage player feedback - even though we were originally pitching it as a tool for product managers at software companies.

And I believe that's because of the way we shaped our UX based on Ruben's feedback.

A postscript

It took me seven years to finally see what Ruben had seen from the beginning: our product was perfectly suited for the video games industry.

I've finally accepted this, and we've now repositioned the product as a player feedback platform for the video games industry.