Bug Reports Are Awesome
They’re opportunities to build trust and rapport with your users and get great user feedback.
When I launched Indexter, I watched, with hope at first as my app logs would blip with excitement, and followed by devastation as the length between blips would get longer and my user engagement flatlined. Until recently, I contemplated pulling the plug and going back to the drawing board to figure out how to hack ChatGPT into the search engine when a serendipitous conversation with a fellow entrepreneur led to a tangible outcome.
It was a bug. I got a message at 6AM saying account linking was busted. No wonder people were not engaging as they couldn’t link their Google drive accounts to begin indexing. After an hour or so of debugging I realized the issue was I was relying on a cookie stored in the browser to link the current signed in user to their credentials, rather than utilizing the state parameter in the auth code portion as this was the intended use case for that field. To make matters worse, I left some harness code in the flow that would always work for my specific email, masking the bug from me 🤦♂. I was also made aware of some crucial UI enhancements that I thought I should punt on (turns out punting was a bad call).
Bug Reports Validate Assumptions
When a user says nothing, it usually means the problem you’re solving is less important. Of course, it’d be great if all our users said great things all the time, but that’s not at all the case in business. When a user complains, it’s a sign that they bought into your proposal for solving a problem they had. They’re rightfully disappointed, but that means you’re a bug ticket away from delivering real value. In a video game, if you’re lost, you can often figure out the right way to go by how many enemies are in the path. At least that’s the approach I take when faced with bug reports.
Bug Reports are Opportunities to Build Trust and Rapport
Many developers view bugs as failures. Who wouldn’t when not accounting for an edge case typically costs developers the job they’re interviewing for, or when a bug total is projected on a dashboard that should ideally read 0 all the time.
I view bug reports as an opportunity to offer white glove service to a customer. In the store above, I got to meet with the user and not only discuss the bug, but really think about ways to make the product better. Ruminating about the problem together gets you and your user on the same team and builds confidence in your ability to deliver when you deliver.
When Starting Out Develop Customers AND Your Product
When you’re a “soloprenuer” you don’t have a customer service team, or account exec army that can handle incoming customer suggestions or complaints; you do it all yourself. Talking to users, complaining about shortcomings together, building trust and rapport are all parts of the job and arguably just as, if not more important than a bulletproof bug-free codebase & architecture.
Shameless Plug
If you have team documentation flung all over the place between Confluence, Google Docs, and others and just want to find answers quickly from Slack or wherever you spend most of your day, check out Indexter. Hiring Indexter is like hiring that person who’s been with the company forever and knows everything, or bringing back the original team who wrote their thoughts down in a long forgotten folder that might be what your company needs to tackle the toughest problem. Give Indexter a try today and let me know what you think!
