How to Shoot yourself in the foot being too smart for your own good

A Tale of a *successful* Product Hunt launch

It is now 2pm PST on a Monday. On Friday night 00:03 PST, some 84 hours ago, Nexar got on Product Hunt. We released it to the App Store shortly before. That was a festive moment, we all gathered together in a video conference, went through the long checklist of important items, gave the servers one final once over, and looked with excitement as Bruno, my co-founder, had the honor of pressing the ‘Release to the App Store’ button on iTunesConnect. Little did we know..

Before we get into the trials and tribulations of the last few days, let me tell you a word about Nexar. Nexar is an AI-powered Dashcam app with the goal of ridding accidents on the road. The Nexar app turns your phone into a smart dashcam that also warns you about dangers around you. We try to make Nexar as smart and as seamless as possible since unlike most apps, when you use Nexar, your eyes and attention should be on the road, not on the app.

As such, we try to handle as much as we can for you. We automatically detect dangerous events worth recording on the road, automatically detect when you start a ride and ended one, automatically sync time-lapses of your rides when you get to Wifi etc. etc. We also automatically manage your storage, which, as we learned, is not always the best choice.

Back to the events of Friday morning. We started the day on a roll, lots of great comments on PH, and equally nice number of upvotes. Initially we were at 2nd place, but very soon we became the top hunt of the day, and maintained that position throughout the day finishing with over 700 upvotes and whooping 104 comments. Many, many, thousands of downloads. On the surface it looks like a great, successful launch. “Venimus, vidimus, vicimus” — We came, we saw, we conquered. Champagne anyone?

What actually happened was quite the opposite. In fact, it was the very definition of startup life, a roller coaster of euphoria and terror. And all because we were too smart for our own good.

A few hours after we got on the air, messages started trickling down on Intercom and in our contact mailbox with a curious pattern. We had quite a few people asking: ‘How can I delete my rides?’. Initially, we thought, ok, some people really want their ride history to be nice and clean, no biggy. So we told them it is in a high place in our To Do list, and should be added shortly. It was actually already at the top of our To Do list, but I didn’t put it as a blocker for the release. In the immortal words of Julia Roberts, that was a ‘Big Mistake. Big. Huge’.

Spot the Differences

The reason I didn’t put ‘manual delete’ as a blocker, other than the fact that we were already anxious to get the app out on the App store, is because I didn’t see it as critical as it actually was. Smart storage management was the first feature we added to Nexar some six months ago, and it is a really sweet feature. It seamlessly takes care of the whole deletion of old rides business and makes sure Nexar will NEVER use more than half of your phone’s free space. Moreover, we have been running with over 300 Pro drivers in San Francisco and Tel Aviv for six months now, and the storage management feature worked without a hitch. And these are drivers that drive 10–14 hours every day!

Fast forward an hour or two later, and we knew we’re facing a SIGNIFICANT problem. You see, our new users had no idea we’ve jumped through all these hoops so that they won’t have to worry about freeing space. Moreover, they wanted to remove their quirky, weird ‘test rides’ when they were trying the app, and not driving. In short they wanted control. And they weren’t shy about it, as my inbox quickly showed me:

delete anyone?

We were frantically answering everyone, explaining that we’re actually taking care of the deletion behind the scenes, and that we’ll be releasing the manual delete feature REALLY soon. The craziest thing was that the more successful we got on PH, and as more publicity came in from Bloomberg TV, Forbes and many others, the stronger the barrage of delete inquiries we got. Talk about going from euphoria to terror. We actually had them both at the same time! How about that for excelling in startuping?

Thankfully, we have the awesomest team ever, and they literally worked all weekend to get the manual delete feature out the door, and it is now released by Apple and available on the App Store. But what are our conclusions from this traumatic episode?

I have a few:

1. Like my good friend Eden likes to say, when you Assume you make an Ass out of U and Me. We assumed that since we never had problems with the app storage, and our beta users never had a problem with storage, our new users won’t either. We forgot we actually invested a lot of time educating our beta users about Nexar and they’ve gotten to know us and trust us. Not the case at all for ‘new user BK from Kuwait’. So please don’t assume. Try to go through the onboarding phase and NUX as if you knew absolutely nothing about your product. Think of all the ways in which people may think the product is crappy and all the ways they may misinterpret your product. It’s a really hard, and painful exercies. But you have to take it in and go through it. Often.
2. Unlike parties, in products, Magic tricks are only good if they are properly explained and communicated. Two sentences during our onboarding phase or in the App description could’ve saved us so much grief. Note they wouldn’t have saved all of it, because many people still expect control, which brings us to point #3.
3. If you provide people with an inbox metaphor of anything, they’ll expect you to implement CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete), or at least CRD. No way around that. Just like you would not implement an API that is not CRUD compliant, you cannot implement such a UX flow. Doesn’t matter how well you can do it for them, they want to do it on their own, at least until they trust you. And yes, that’s a blocker.

Now an interesting question to ask is, why wasn’t that an issue for our existing beta users? After all they’ve been driving with us for many months, and had many feature requests, way more complex than ‘delete’. We built a very cool in-car incident feature for them, we built a cool screen saver for them (try to swipe right and shake your phone well, it’s FUN). We built so many other things. Well, now that I had the night to think about it, I think the reason is that our users were, by and large, pro drivers, who are quite accustomed to the concept of a Dashcam, since many of them had a physical dashcam. As such, they knew the basic feature of every dashcam is roll over recording which automatically deletes the video from the memory card. Since we said we’re a ‘Smart’ Dashcam, they expected as much. That was the least we could do.

Our new users are by and large consumers and for them, Dashcams are not yet a common thing they are acquainted with. Many of them didn’t realize we deal with storage automatically and actually expected they will need to manually go and delete their old rides. This is a subtle gap, but in the last few days, it made all the difference in the world.

Thankfully, this crisis is just about over, now that a new version is out on the App Store, which has the coveted delete function. We have a few other ‘obvious’ features to be fixed, and we will continue to make such mistakes and blunders as we improve our ability to empathize with our users and put ourselves in their shoes, but hopefully not as big. We learned so much these past few days, and this is one experience I am never going to ‘delete’.