Overpromising with Kevin

Young, Scrappy, and Hungry is Typedream’s podcast where our founders talk about the product, stuff they’ve learned along the way, the founder mindset, and things they think about as immigrant startup founders in Silicon Valley.

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/76zrNyoOMzSw5l0TTA2CA4?si=e8dc7c474f714298

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/overpromising/id1678220914?i=1000606850658

Full Transcript

Boop. Hey, guys. My name is Kevin, and I'm one of the co-founders and CEO here at Typedream. And welcome to yet another episode of Young, Scrappy, and Hungry. This is a podcast from the team here at Typedream, where we want to share our learnings and document our journey in building Typedream.

So in today's episode, I want to walk you guys through our recent tagline change. So if you go ahead and check our Twitter page, we are now the Canva of web pages where you can build pages, link in bios, forms, blogs, shops, all without the need to code. And I want to tell you guys about why the tagline change.

So back in 2021, Typedream launched a product on Product Hunt. We received a ton of love from the Product Hunt community, from the Typedream community, and from a lot of people on Twitter as well. We were the #1 Product of the Day, #1 Product of the Week, the #1 Product of the Month. We kind of expected that we wanted to get the Golden Kitty Award, but unfortunately, we didn't. But these were good enough. And as you can see, our tagline back then was a no-code site builder that is as easy as Notion and as pretty as Webflow.

So we delivered on a no-code site builder that is as easy as Notion, but we didn't really deliver on being as pretty as WebFlow. That is why we wanted to change the tagline. That is why we also want to change our product, moving forward to becoming and staying true to what we want Typedream to be, which is simple and beautiful.

Over the past two years, what I've learned is that when we stated we wanted to be as pretty as Webflow, people sort of expected that they could do it, obviously because we stated it. So what happens when you over-promise to your audience, your users, your potential users as well? Is that feature requests starting to come in? They say that, "Okay, I don't like the navbar up top, like how you guys do it. I want it floating at the bottom of the screen." Sometimes people wanted them at the left side of the screen, vertical instead of a horizontal navbar, and we really didn't support that. And on top of that, people wanted to use fonts that we didn't have, inject code in parts of the page that we didn't allow, embed things that we didn't really support.

And eventually we learned our lesson and not over-promising our users what our product can or cannot do. We were first-time founders. We really wanted to get the attention of people on the Internet. So I guess we were kind of guilty in a way that we wanted to make the tagline sound as sexy as we can, and in our heads at the time, if it's as easy to use as Notion and you can produce the previous looking website. Who would want that? And apparently around 3000 people kind of agreed that they wanted something that is as easy to use as Notion and the result of the as pretty as Webflow.

So I think the lesson learned here, it's pretty basic. It's just don't over-promise to your users. I understand that there's pressure as a product builder, as a company, or maybe sometimes as an indie hacker you want to try to make the sexiest sounding tagline so that people are drawn to check out what you're building. But there's a price to pay if you over-promise. Users will start to expect that promise to be delivered. They'll request features so that that promise is delivered. And if that isn't the way that you want to build the product, you'll stray further and further away from your goal. So we learned our lesson, we changed it. We want to be more in the design industry. It'll be more like Canva instead of Adobe. So, you know, simple and beautiful, not really complex to use, no crazy pixel controls. We want to stay more and more true to the principles that we have here at Typedream.

And yeah, we just wanted to share the lessons learned of not over-promising to your users. And thank you so much, guys, for listening. I really appreciate your time. And stay tuned for the next episode of Young, Scrappy and Hungry, and yeah, see you guys on the next one. Bye.