Kill the HiPPO

Hello! Marketing and self-promotion are not things that come easy to me; I’d much rather fire up my IDE and spend the morning coding. So aiming to get this newsletter written and sent every week for one year is a good exercise for me. Having said that, I missed writing last week’s newsletter because I was at an industry event in Brighton, UK. I’m trying to go easy on myself, accepting the reality that I can’t do all the things all the time - especially here in the Spanish summer where the...

Hello! This week I have a podcast appearance to announce, a stellar Amazon review to share, and my thoughts on why it is so hard to get feedback for your product - and some creative ways that might work. Kill the HiPPO arrives in Singapore Kill the HiPPO is available in just about every Amazon regional site—except for Amazon Singapore, and I have no idea why. My co-writer, Siew Ann Tan, lives in Singapore, so she was unable to get author copies of her own book! I ordered some additional...

Hello! Ever built a feature you thought your users wanted, only to find that no one uses it? If you’ve been running a software company for long enough, this will have happened to you at least once. The strange thing is it can even happen when you received lots of requests for the feature. The “popular” feature no one used The integrations in my product, Feature Upvote, are popular. Slack, Jira, MS Teams, Discord - almost every customer adds at least one of these integrations to their account....

Hello! Kill the HiPPO news In last week’s email I mentioned that a German-language product management blog published a post about Kill the HiPPO; in the following days, I sold a few copies on Amazon’s German site. It’s satisfying to see an immediate result from a promotion effort, especially in comparison to the marketing efforts for my company’s software product, which typically take months to show any results. Also last week I was interviewed on the Rogue Startups podcast about Kill the...

Hello! Kill the HiPPO news The German-language site produktbezogen.de has a post about Kill the HiPPO - in German! I’m still looking for podcast guest opportunities - particularly lower profile ones at this stage where I can hone my message without the stress of a big audience. If you have a personal connection to someone who runs a suitable podcast, I’d love an introduction. Thanks to the two people who suggested applying to be on the biggest and mightiest product management podcasts of them...

“Dogfooding” is a delightful term we use in the software industry for the important practice of actually using your own product in your company’s day-to-day operations. It comes from the equally delightful expression, to eat your own dogfood. Dogfooding is, I believe, in a league above any other process for making sure your software is actually good. If you are not already dogfooding, start doing it now. You’ll immediately discover that your features are unfinished, your product’s UI lacks...

My friend and fellow bootstrapper Michael Koper wrote on social media: My biggest customer requests a feature. It is useful only for 5% of our users. I quickly spin up a Claude session to get the feel of it. It adds 900 lines of code, decent quality. It makes the code more complicated, because it is in the core and it touches a lot of things. They already are on a massive commitment, customer for 10 years. Biggest LTV we have.Dilemma!!! For context, Michael’s company Nusii is currently a...