Show HN: HintPod – Reach product/market fit quicker | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: HintPod – Reach product/market fit quicker

hintpod.com

37 pointskumailh511 comments

Good effort, but...

This will not help you get product-market fit.

Product-market fit is about careful user segmentation and need/pain assessment, followed by product positioning. None of which this approach helps with.

This app is just a potpourri of feedback and a popularity contest without understanding WHO you should listen to and WHO you should ignore and WHY.

The creators of this app need to do more research on how to achieve product-market fit if that's what they're going to use as the pitch.

Perhaps I should clarify why we believe HintPod can help businesses achieve product-market fit. HintPod isn’t an app, it’s a plugin that integrates directly inside other apps (kinda like intercom).

I believe this helps businesses reach validation because they can see if their users are actually engaging with their vision. General analytics can show engagement with the app as a product, but engaging in a community hub inside a mobile app shows engagement between the user and the business’ vision.

Additionally, by following suggestions from their users, businesses can improve on their app and build a better product that they know their target audience actually wants.

HintPod gives businesses validation and helps them build a better product for their users. This is done through the plugin that enables a community hub directly inside the app. And through this, they can get closer to finding product-market fit.

I agree it isn’t enough on its own, but it can facilitate this.

I think the thing being said here is that market fit is a known exercise often practiced as part of funding raises or model validation before products are built. This tool seems like a really cool tool for rating and Ranking items in a Product Roadmaping exercise

Right, I see. Thanks for explaining that. Perhaps we should use a different way to describe it. I do think it helps businesses understand their customers better, but perhaps this isn’t the way to describe it.

My co-founder and I are both developers and whenever we used to make apps we found getting feedback on the apps was very difficult. App store reviews were very one-sided and emails were usually ignored by users. So we made HintPod it’s a SaaS platform that allows developers and businesses to get feedback from their customers directly inside their apps. What we've developed so far is called Suggestions and it consists of a list of suggestions submitted by users. Businesses and developers can also engage with the users and their suggestions through HintPod. Users don’t have to login or leave your app to submit their feedback. It’s free to use so I’d love to hear what you guys think about it. Thanks.

I see what you’re trying to do here, but I would be surprised if this helps in getting feedback from users. By far the main reason users don’t give feedback is because they don’t care about the product. This doesn’t help to address that issue.

That may be true but we are focusing on scenarios where the user is motivated to give feedback but then gives up due to there being too many obstacles for them to give feedback. With HintPod the user won't have to leave the app they are currently using at all. Making it a seamless experience.

I like the idea and implementation, but wouldn't use it in production. I can see pretty solid value in it being a QA/Beta tool to shorten feedback loops on non-prod releases.

If the motive is to help people achieve a product/market fit, using this in beta testing with real target personas would be far more valuable (to me, at least) than sticking it into prod and dealing with separating the signal from the noise.

Thank you for your pov. We really need more perspectives on it since we still aren't sure how we should market it or how people would like to use it. Beta testing is one of the routes we believe HintPod would be useful for so we definitely do have that in mind. But as I said we haven't narrowed down the use cases so we're leaving it up to the customers to decide how they'd like to use HintPod.

This is a great idea. Any plans for a web version?

Thanks so much! Currently, we're focusing only on the mobile versions since there aren't a lot of alternatives or services that do this in a native mobile package but we do have plans to release a web version in future.

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