A couple of months ago, Meenah and I hired a personal trainer. We realized that the physical activity in our daily routine had been just about zero for a while, and decided to make this change. It has been quite grueling, and sometimes when we’re in the middle of a workout we do wonder why we’re doing this to ourselves, but 2 months in and we have seen drastic changes in our energy levels, and more importantly, our core strength. 

As the end of Q3 was nearing, we decided to test the core strength of our product as well. As you all are already aware, we were off to the races as soon as we launched – gaining traction in terms of downloads, users, transactions and countries at a somewhat alarming pace. While we are ecstatic and grateful for the initial response we have received, we are aware that it is very easy to get carried away seeing all these numbers keep going up and forgetting what we want our product to be. What this product needs to be.

We had been tempted to keep adding feature upon feature and our product roadmap initially reflected that. However, as we kept digging deeper into the data we realized we might be foregoing core strength for accelerated gains, an unsustainable path to be on. September was the month of ‘data > vibes’ for us!

Thus, our theme for Q4 2022 is “Strengthening our core” – focusing on whether the product is doing what it’s supposed to be doing flawlessly in its current state, instead of jumping on to new, shiny ideas. We stripped down our Q4 product roadmap, launched an ‘Are we Simple’ project, dived deep into Mixpanel and BigQuery, began user interviews and kicked off usability testing. More on these in the next section.

We had a great call with Giacomo a week or so ago, and he reminded us of a Y-Combinator mantra for early stage products – ‘Find a few users that love you versus many users that sort of like you.’ Discussions with other mentors, including the awesome people at Outliers, gave further validation to what we were already thinking.

As our spaceship keeps racing at supersonic speed, we need to make sure the nuts and bolts are tight at all times and fixes are made at the same pace.

- OpK