I think all feedback is helpful. (Engaging with the people who provide the feedback, however, can be more trouble than it's worth. You have to know when to let go.)
We launched stdlib [1] two weeks ago and while we saw a lot of positive reactions, there was a very vocal minority who lashed back against our "marketing speak" and lack of things like SLAs. This quickly devolved into tearing apart the product itself, with someone going as far as to say if the commercial venture is successful, we will ruin the lives of thousands of developers (!!).
The response was actually tremendously valuable --- our marketing material sucks for a developer tool. It doesn't describe what the product does well enough. Heck, it still doesn't because we've been iterating on features more than messaging.
It was easy to instantly jump to the defensive, and I think I did to begin with, but I'm learning that adversarial comments are actually just a really straightforward question disguised as incredulity. "What's your value prop?" Some people might not get it right away, some never will. But my goal, personally, is to reduce the amount of people that ask that question. :)
Yup, read that, no idea what it does. Now not to bash you, but here's some things you guys might want to look at.
For one, there's truth in the saying "Users don't give a sh*t about your vision". They're as self-serving as anyone, and they want to know what good your thing does for them. It's great folly to not tell them once they have reached your site and are ready to listen.
Second, "marketing speak“ is feel-good fluff, designed to obfuscate meaning, just like political speak. You're doing something technical, don't use marketing speak. Talk facts, talk applications, talk guides and tutorials. This leads to two great outcomes. One is that the people you're trying to reach understand exactly what you're saying. Two, you don't have to feel smarmy saying it.
Then, try to see your messaging as another component of your overall project. Imagine you have some kickass servers crunching numbers, but your load balancer is an arduino running on potato batteries. No bueno. Now you don't have to make everything perfect, but your copy should do your project justice.
Also, focusing on features over "messaging“ seems like something I'd do if I didn't know how to do marketing and wanted to avoid the topic altogether. Make sure you're not neglecting critical areas because you're uncomfortable with them. If lack of confidence/knowledge is an issue, I'd recommend picking up a copy of Claude Hopkins "Scientific Advertising". It's only 80 pages, there's pdfs of it floating around on-line, and I think it gets the principles down nicely.
You're 100% right. Thanks for the feedback. It's exactly because we're not as good at marketing, and are focusing on what we're best at. :) (But you can't avoid blind spots forever!) I'll take a look at the book --- thanks for the recommendation!
It looks like a great idea, and we've been waiting for years for someone to do this. 'Serverless servcies' is a big deal.
That said - there's too little information regarding how it works. For server side stuff, we need to know how many transactions it's going to handle, how often - so things like cpu+memory - or some way to measure it ... are going to be important.
Thank you! Yep, we'll get there. Right now you can consider it a "microservices playground" during the early beta, but we'll have more technical specifications out soon.
A thousand times this. Negative criticism is a sign you've touched a topic people care about, but have failed to explain yourself well. It is good! You're much more likely to receive no feedback at all. People ignore things they don't care about.
I think all feedback is helpful. (Engaging with the people who provide the feedback, however, can be more trouble than it's worth. You have to know when to let go.)
We launched stdlib [1] two weeks ago and while we saw a lot of positive reactions, there was a very vocal minority who lashed back against our "marketing speak" and lack of things like SLAs. This quickly devolved into tearing apart the product itself, with someone going as far as to say if the commercial venture is successful, we will ruin the lives of thousands of developers (!!).
The response was actually tremendously valuable --- our marketing material sucks for a developer tool. It doesn't describe what the product does well enough. Heck, it still doesn't because we've been iterating on features more than messaging.
It was easy to instantly jump to the defensive, and I think I did to begin with, but I'm learning that adversarial comments are actually just a really straightforward question disguised as incredulity. "What's your value prop?" Some people might not get it right away, some never will. But my goal, personally, is to reduce the amount of people that ask that question. :)
[1] https://stdlib.com