As we’re approaching a pretty big milestone for Luro, I’ve been thinking a lot about all the effort that’s gone into the product. Not just the effort from members on the team, but also from the people beta testing our app. A trickle here, a flood there, I squeal with glee when new issues arrive. Your feedback means the world to small teams, it impacts the direction of the product more than you could ever imagine.

High fives we can retweet are awesome but what’s been most valuable is the feedback and considered criticisms we’ve received. Did something not work? Was something hard to understand? Did something take too many clicks? These stories impact milestones and roadmaps. I want to make these frustrations my frustrations.

Even a good old fashioned “Y’know what I wish/think your product could do…” can turn a small boat around. In fact, we spent the whole summer building out a new core feature based almost entirely on a welcomed suggestion. We have a lot of ideas (AI for dogs!) but I will trade a million growth hacks to build something genuinely useful for folks.

I know everyone’s busy and it’s a lot to ask, but if you encounter a bug and manage to get a lil’ screen grab or some reproduction steps, the chances I can find a fix sky rockets. Often we may already know about the issue, but it has fallen off the radar with all the other priorities, a little nudge helps us reprioritize. On average those bugs get fixed the fastest.

You have an oversized impact when giving feedback to small teams; it makes an enormous splash in a small pond. I think that’s true for any small collective of people working on something, whether it’s a small startup or open source project. Oversized impact can be good or bad, I guess. If you lob a giant turd over the fence you potentially ruined the day of an entire group of people, not some faceless corporation. I know I’ve made that mistake before. But deliver a kind word, you might have helped a team in need.

To any of the kind people who have given your time or feedback in the past – or if you find the energy to do so in the future – I want to say, thank you. It means a lot.