KaiKul#4 Pocket Book: “To Pivot, To Gather Feedbacks and To Handle Overwhelmed Feeling.
With my respect, this is my written startup journey aiming to document, reflect and share how we are building a startup, KaiKul, since day one, https://kaikul.com/. Hope this might helpful to you and can be your shortcut to your journey. Welcome to the KaiKul forth month.
This journey will be written into 3 sections:
- Journey
- Hindsight (challenges & happy moments)
- Next actionable items
JOURNEY
To Pivot
Even though it’s really difficult for making this decision but we decided to pivot from only focusing on our previous feature, “KaiKul Weekly Catchup” but we enhanced it by connecting people via Slack, with distinct channels such as product-announcement and q-and-a, and added new 3 features of KaiKul because of these two main reasons.
1) The retention rate and customer acquisition are less than 10 percent.
2) Found out that users’d like to check in daily, have reflection, and understand their weekly performance.
If you’re not sure that you should pivot your product or not, do not think by yourself but just go finding needs from lots of users.
To Gather Feedbacks
There are many ways we have tried, but the main super useful methods are:
- Create your community via Slack. Find ways to interact with them weekly or daily and ask them for feedbacks.
- Go to where your users are such as Reddit and Indie Hackers and be users with them.
- Get to know new people by attending the new offline or online events and ask them to try your product and give an easy question like “What do you think?”.
And what do you think about using KaiKul? 😂 Thank you in advance 😊.
To Handle Overwhelmed Feeling
Actions I have done and worked well for me.
- Mental: talking with a psychological therapist for one time. Felt better to share something and answered a lot of questions.
- Mental: meditating 30 minutes 5 days a week. More aware to your thoughts and easier to let it go. Be an observer, not the owner. Plus, feel fun after done it 30 minutes because I like the feeling when my legs went numb 🤣.
- Mental: working in the new environment such as the Starbuck near a river and a new room or table at your home.
- Mental: deleted all social media on your phone and use it on the browser instead. This reduced time usage, resulting in better mood and less automatic comparison. (Still download it before bed sometimes for relaxing o.O)
- Mental & Physical: one hour weight lifting and 50-min fast walking with 5 incline and 5.0–60 speeds 2–3 times a week. Apart from feeling fresh after done it, you’d feel happy when you see your body transformed at a mirror.
HINDSIGHT (Challenge & Happy Moments)
Challenge
- New Co-Founder: quite challenge to find the new co-founder with the same vision and mission. At the end, I believe that we’ll figure it out. If you’re interested in personal development and have skills of coding (JS), just email to setthawut@kaikul.com with your backgrounds, what’s the reason you’d like to join and what do you expect from this startup.
- Time frame: along the way, there’re new features added so the initial time frame expanded. Although it’s a bit challenge but it’s very good that users requested the new features :) because this tells us we’re on the right path. Just need to find more team members or a new co-founder.
Happy Moments
- After sent out recruiting announcement. An amount of people reached out to us, and they’re really interested in our project. Even, some are willing to work for free. Happy to know that our idea is good for them.
- Even though lots of requests coming while building our first MVP, it was formed within 2 weeks. Credits to Kaili 🔥. Also, so blissful that we got good feedbacks on both individual and team features.
- Got to know how to handle myself better while pursuing the uncertain direction and being in the lots of information age.
NEXT ACTIONABLE ITEMS
- Find more users (100+).
- Find new team members or a new co-founder.
- Gather more & more feedbacks and enhance KaiKul.
That’s our forth-month startup journey. What do you think about this journey? just comment here or email to setthawut@kaikul.com☺.️
Interested to read the third month journey of “To Validate Ideas, Find Beta Users and Seek Out Experienced Wisidom.”? Here it is, https://setthawut-kul.medium.com/kaikul-journey-3rd-month-f16fc55db3f3.
[The fifth month journey] “To New Member, To Enhance Infrastructure and To Find New Target Audience” https://setthawut-kul.medium.com/kaikul-5-pocket-book-to-new-member-to-enhance-infrastructure-and-to-find-new-target-audience-ee3e175b5c49
