Hello Sofia,
I’m a first time founder and always struggled to spot the customers who look like XYZ. If you have to apply this during the very early days, how would you do it differently?
Wonderful question @davidhart.
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Thanks for the question! 
I would say that before releasing a new feature or an improvement, I know that we have something when I’ve heard about the same problem over and over again, we’ve put an initial solution (staging/prototype, etc.) in front of customers, and they react as though we have reinvented sliced bread. The excitement is obvious.
This does not mean that you will have a successful feature. It just means that you are on the right path.
After release, the only strong indicator I use is engagement. Are people using the thing?
We have released many features that had massive excitement at the testing stage and when released were never used or were barely used.
If the initial excitement is there but the post-release engagement is not, perhaps you just need to step back and figure out a more elegant, practical, simple solution, then do it all over again:
- Talk to customers.
- Show them initial solutions.
- Check excitement.
- Release the first version.
- Check engagement, and if not positive,
- Go back to step one.
At EnjoyHQ, we had a couple of features that became successful after 5+ iterations.
Don’t kill stuff just because it didn’t work the first time around. If the problem persists, you still have work to do. That’s how I go about it.
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I’m afraid we need some volume. If you only have 10 customers it is hard to see a pattern but there is one somewhere. If they are paying they most be paying for something in common. At the beginning it sucks because you don’t have a ton of data but keep listening and asking questions, trust me those patterns will emerge if you don’t stop being curious about your customers and passionate about solving their problems.
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Hi @Sofia, thanks for the insightful answers. I’m sure they will be super useful. 
Hey everyone, Sofia will be around to answer more questions later in the day. So, if you have any other questions, keep them coming!
I think 5 customers is ok as long as you feel they are saying exactly the same thing. Almost no difference. If you have 5 conversations and they are similar but not repetitive enough I would talk to more people. You almost want to know that those 5 people could sit in a room and node at each other if they were talking about the problem they have. If that is not the case, maybe you need to talk to more. The number is arbitrary, is more about how many people you need to talk to in order to hear the same thing over and over again 
Does that make sense?
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Hey James! Great to see you here!
The way I think about it is mostly based on whether or not we want the type of customers the feature may bring.
For example, because we are a customer research platform, sometimes we have researchers in academia trying to use our product for their research, even though we can help to a certain extent we know that we don’t want to get into that segment because of a variety of reasons like pricing, the type fo features they need, etc, it is very easy for us to say, we hear you but we are not the right tool for you and we will not build the features you are requesting. I think it is a matter of vision and understanding where the product may be more successful. This is just one dimension of that thinking but generally speaking, if we are not helping the core target market deep enough we don’t build it.
Regarding communicating that to the team, we do a business catch up call every month with everybody and we discuss product strategy in-depth so this is an ongoing conversation, we don’t have surprises there 
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Thanks Sofia, that makes sense.
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Hi @Sofia, thank you for joining us for the AMA and answering the questions in such depth! It was great having you onboard.
And thanks to everyone who participated in the AMA. Hope to see you around for the upcoming AMAs as well. Stay tuned!
@wingman4sales, @paul, @abhi_wecp, @akebrattberg, @davidhart, @jonny, @dlitt, @jamesgill. 
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Great stuff!