Shengkun Ye

I made an app to keep up with the world without information overload Here’s how it works👇

Our early users didn’t care about our roadmap. They cared about being heard. So we stopped promising features. Started shipping one small request every week. They noticed. They stayed. Turns out loyalty isn’t built with vision. It’s built with follow-through.

shared another little thing I’ve been working on: Dim Notes it's an auto-tagging note app. you just write. don't organize anything. AI creates the tags and links your thoughts together. curious what you think.

A01 made it to top 3 today👏

Early traction is measured in direction, not size. 10 users who stick > 100 users who bounce. 3 people who pay > 30 who don’t care. Chasing “more” too early hides what’s broken.

started a discord for feedback and it’s been way more helpful than I expected. only ~50 people in there, but it’s active. they ask questions, suggest stuff, and once they feel heard, they keep coming back. tiny crew, but solid.

Most early products aren’t failing because of missing features. They’re failing because users can’t feel the point of them. If someone needs a demo to “get it,” you’re not there yet. They should feel it in 30 seconds or less.

just made our first launch video first time editing too does it come across clearly?

We learned the hard way: onboarding isn’t the start of the journey. It is the journey. For most consumer users, onboarding is all they’ll ever see. So we stopped calling it onboarding. Started calling it the product.

There was a week where everything broke. Infra issues. Support backlog. Users angry. We paused all feature work. Spent 5 days fixing bugs, writing docs, improving onboarding. Growth slowed. Then it bounced back stronger. Sometimes progress looks like standing still.

Speed isn't about rushing. It’s about reducing the gap between question and answer. Got a hunch? Test it today. Confused about a drop? Ask 5 users now. The shorter that loop, the faster you grow. Not by guessing more. But by guessing less.

Building consumer apps is humbling. People don’t give second chances. If they bounce in 10 seconds, that’s it. No email. No feedback. Just silence. So you don’t get to ask “why didn’t it work?” You have to build like you’ll never get to ask.

We once spent days debating a feature. Then a user found a workaround we hadn’t thought of. That solved their problem with zero code. Taught us to listen more and speculate less. Your roadmap shouldn’t outpace your users.

We spent 3 weeks building a feature users kept asking for. Launched it. Nobody used it. Turns out, “I would love this” doesn’t mean “I’ll change my behavior for this.” The hardest part isn’t hearing what users say. It’s knowing what they really mean.

Our churn looked fine until we split it by channel. One segment had 8x higher retention. The rest were just noise. Lesson: growth is not about more users. It’s about finding the right pocket and digging deeper. Don't average your way into denial.

The feedback that hurts the most is usually the one you need. You ignore it at first. Then try to disprove it. Eventually, you realize they were right. You just weren’t ready to hear it. That’s progress. Just not the kind that shows up on a dashboard.

The biggest unlock for us wasn’t a feature. It was realizing we were onboarding to the wrong aha moment. We kept showing value at step 5. But most users dropped at step 3. We moved the aha earlier. Activation doubled.

we replied to every single user within 5 minutes during this beta launch. Even at 2am. Not because it scaled but because it built trust. And because when someone’s stuck, the right reply in 5 minutes beats the perfect fix in 5 days.

“engagement” is a trap if you’re not clear what it means. scrolling isn’t the same as caring. clicks aren’t the same as connection.

Most startup advice skips the timeline. Yes, talk to users. Yes, iterate fast. But how often? Here’s what worked for us early on: - Talked to 15 users/week - Shipped 2 updates/week - Rewrote our onboarding 3x in the first month Speed compounds. So does clarity.

when in doubt, watch a real user. not a power user. just someone who doesn’t care about your app yet. that’s the person you have to win.