ih_fan
- Blog : this was the single most valuable part of IH in the early days. Your struggles to grow, make money were so relatable. While the numbers might not have given you an idea of how wonderful the blog was, I'm sure people who've read it feel the same. Please consider restarting the blog. Share your struggles, what metrics you track, what goals if any Stripe expects you to hit, life post acquisition, why you make certain decisions (pushing for signups which IMO is a terrible idea) etc. The blog can be a great way to get feedback before making changes.
- Don't push for signups. Someone mentioned that signing up was required to read the transcripts. This pushes people away. While the numbers might be great, moving away from a no BS design rarely works long term. It's good that you reverted that signup requirement.
- Community participation : You and your brother's participation is extremely valuable but I've noticed that you guys are taking a back seat and letting the community grow organically. In theory it sounds good, but I urge you to reconsider. The community is not large enough to be self sustaining.
- Development speed : Why do you take sooo long to make simple changes like changing the navbar? If there's a reason, I'd love to learn why this is so. Please move a little faster. All the changes like badges, changing the podcasts page. interviews page, adding Stripe verified revenue actually make the experience worse. The interview and podcast pages are unusable now with so much going on. It's so cluttered. The old one was way better. The new design has actively pushed me away from the interviews and podcasts. Focus on building features that actually make a meaningful difference : DMs, software to organize meetups etc.
- Speed : the IH site is slow and full of junk tracking. Please make it work faster. SPAs are great in theory but are almost always worse than server rendered pages.