Delight Yourself First

They say the first stage of product-market fit is delighting your customers. But there's something that should come first.

We've dogfooded Pebble from the beginning. We use it to build new features, fix our own bugs, run our support. Which sounds great in theory. In practice, for the first six to nine months, it was painful in a way that was genuinely demoralizing. The product was buggy enough that I'd regularly hit a bug trying to fix a bug trying to fix a bug. I started to dread opening it.

So I spent a lot of time just fixing bugs. Not building, fixing. And then, slowly, we turned a corner. I could use the product every day without hating myself. The basics just worked.

Then we built a database integration so Pebble could query our data directly, and suddenly we could diagnose and fix a whole class of issues we'd been handling manually. Same with logs. And we let Pebble join our Slack conversations, which unlocked something unexpected: it became the only tool that made async work genuinely effective for us.

Finally the product delighted me. And now it's starting to delight our customers.

I don't think there's a shortcut here. You can't consistently build something your customers love if you haven't gotten there yourself first. The instincts you develop from using a product every day, the things that still don't feel right, the workarounds you've stopped noticing because you built them: that's the product intelligence that doesn't come from user interviews.

I say all of this, to let you know, if you're considering using Pebble: we use it, we find it delightful, we also know a 100 ways it could be better and we're working on them. And as a user of Pebble, Pebble will record all your feedback and take action on it. If you'd like to shape the future of support, we'd love to hear from you.