
Show HN: HintPod – Reach product/market fit quicker - kumailh5
http://hintpod.com
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glaive123
Good effort, but...

This will not help you get product-market fit.

Product-market fit is about careful user segmentation and need/pain
assessment, followed by product positioning. None of which this approach helps
with.

This app is just a potpourri of feedback and a popularity contest without
understanding WHO you should listen to and WHO you should ignore and WHY.

The creators of this app need to do more research on how to achieve product-
market fit if that's what they're going to use as the pitch.

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kumailh5
Perhaps I should clarify why we believe HintPod can help businesses achieve
product-market fit. HintPod isn’t an app, it’s a plugin that integrates
directly inside other apps (kinda like intercom).

I believe this helps businesses reach validation because they can see if their
users are actually engaging with their vision. General analytics can show
engagement with the app as a product, but engaging in a community hub inside a
mobile app shows engagement between the user and the business’ vision.

Additionally, by following suggestions from their users, businesses can
improve on their app and build a better product that they know their target
audience actually wants.

HintPod gives businesses validation and helps them build a better product for
their users. This is done through the plugin that enables a community hub
directly inside the app. And through this, they can get closer to finding
product-market fit.

I agree it isn’t enough on its own, but it can facilitate this.

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batoure
I think the thing being said here is that market fit is a known exercise often
practiced as part of funding raises or model validation before products are
built. This tool seems like a really cool tool for rating and Ranking items in
a Product Roadmaping exercise

~~~
kumailh5
Right, I see. Thanks for explaining that. Perhaps we should use a different
way to describe it. I do think it helps businesses understand their customers
better, but perhaps this isn’t the way to describe it.

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kumailh5
My co-founder and I are both developers and whenever we used to make apps we
found getting feedback on the apps was very difficult. App store reviews were
very one-sided and emails were usually ignored by users. So we made HintPod
it’s a SaaS platform that allows developers and businesses to get feedback
from their customers directly inside their apps. What we've developed so far
is called Suggestions and it consists of a list of suggestions submitted by
users. Businesses and developers can also engage with the users and their
suggestions through HintPod. Users don’t have to login or leave your app to
submit their feedback. It’s free to use so I’d love to hear what you guys
think about it. Thanks.

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rajacombinator
I see what you’re trying to do here, but I would be surprised if this helps in
getting feedback from users. By far the main reason users don’t give feedback
is because they don’t care about the product. This doesn’t help to address
that issue.

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kumailh5
That may be true but we are focusing on scenarios where the user is motivated
to give feedback but then gives up due to there being too many obstacles for
them to give feedback. With HintPod the user won't have to leave the app they
are currently using at all. Making it a seamless experience.

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cmdshiftf4
I like the idea and implementation, but wouldn't use it in production. I can
see pretty solid value in it being a QA/Beta tool to shorten feedback loops on
non-prod releases.

If the motive is to help people achieve a product/market fit, using this in
beta testing with real target personas would be far more valuable (to me, at
least) than sticking it into prod and dealing with separating the signal from
the noise.

~~~
kumailh5
Thank you for your pov. We really need more perspectives on it since we still
aren't sure how we should market it or how people would like to use it. Beta
testing is one of the routes we believe HintPod would be useful for so we
definitely do have that in mind. But as I said we haven't narrowed down the
use cases so we're leaving it up to the customers to decide how they'd like to
use HintPod.

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reubensutton
This is a great idea. Any plans for a web version?

~~~
kumailh5
Thanks so much! Currently, we're focusing only on the mobile versions since
there aren't a lot of alternatives or services that do this in a native mobile
package but we do have plans to release a web version in future.

