10 unhappy users

At Membrane, one of our early goals was to have 10 unhappy users.

When only 10 programmers had used Membrane, 10 out of 10 might be unhappy in some way. Then at 100 users, maybe 10 are still unhappy. Once we reach 1,000 programmers relying on Membrane, just 10 are unhappy. And at 10k, 100k, 1m, and beyond, merely 10 unhappy users would make Membrane a world-class product.

N happy users

10 unhappy users is a spin on N happy users, an internal tracking system Juan brought over from his time at Mighty. They had a spreadsheet filled out from user interviews with a boolean column for "happy (Y/N)".

It's easier to find happy users than unhappy ones. They say nice things on Twitter, in our Discord server, over email, and in user interviews. They log in a lot. They like our tweets and respond to our blog posts.

Unhappy users are a lot harder to find.

Ten unhappy users

Having 10 unhappy users really just means we are getting consistent feedback, learning, and improving.

Finding unhappy users requires some level of proactivity. Fortunately for us, we dogfood Membrane daily, so we are often our own unhappiest users. Beyond that, some folks email us or send messages on Discord/Twitter with bugs and friction. But in large part, we have to seek out negative feedback.

We recently set a goal for each of us on the Membrane team to complete at least one user interview per month. After launching significant features I'll often bump up that goal for myself to 1+ per week.

Unhappy users most often churn silently, so as we grow we'll rely more on monitoring tools like Sentry and PostHog to gauge what's not good enough.

Help wanted

If you're feeling impatient, skeptical, unfiltered, or demanding, come try Membrane and let us know what's making you unhappy.

- Pete Millspaugh (pete@membrane.io)