Feedback in early stage startups

In the early days of building a developer tooling startup, your product is molten metal. It is glowing, it is volatile, and it is shapeable. It’s in this red-hot state that feedback becomes your furnace. The right kind of feedback doesn't just shape your product; it battle-tests it. It defines it. And, ultimately, it determines whether you’re forging a sword or a spoon.

Over the weekend, a friend building a developer tooling product showed me feedback they received from an engineering leader at one of the largest consumer businesses in India. It was precise, it was actionable, and it spoke about the missing capabilities (many of which were already in the roadmap). It did not come from a point of belittling the product, but from a position of how the product can improve much beyond of what it is right now.

A couple months ago, I was speaking to an Engineering Leader at one of the largest consumer businesses in the world about a particular developer tooling company and we ended up speaking on what separates a great tool vs an okay tool. What he said resonated with me a lot.

He said: “The availability and abundance of great feedback.” Especially in the context of developer tool startups.

But not all feedback is created equal.

“It’ll be cool if you build this.”

“I don’t like the UI”

“Looks cool”

are like lukewarm taps on the metal that never really shape anything. This feedback is being provided for the sake of it. It doesn’t challenge your assumptions. It doesn’t reveal edge cases. It doesn’t validate your roadmap.

Great feedback is laser focused. It’s specific, it’s honest, and comes from someone who actually tried to solve a real problem using your tool. It’s the hammer strike when the iron is glowing.

“Your CLI assumes the presence of a .env file, but that’s not a safe assumption for containerised environments. This broke in CI/CD.”

“Multi-repo cannot be linked and only a single repo can be used at a time. A lot of the code in large engineering organisations is multi-repo.” “Your automation capabilities only assume cloud infrastructure and is lacking automation capabilities on local infrastructure.”

Now we’re talking. Feedback like this highlights between your assumptions and production realities, shows real usage in real environments, and reveals edge cases you hadn’t considered.

However, not everyone will care to provide you great feedback. It is this journey you as a founder have to undertake on identifying people who will take the pain to give you feedback. People who will share the truth instead of just being kind. Early stage is where your product has to fail, in the hands of the right users. You want to expose brittle edges before you scale.

Your product won't always be molten hot. Eventually, it will harden. That's why the early stage is so crucial, it is one of the few moments to hammer at the product and shape something worth scaling.