Cycle App

Co-Founder & CEO

eFounders

Entrepreneur In Residence

Lab Box

Product Manager

Simplus Innovation

Co-Founder

Riaktr (formerly Real Impact Analytics)

Data Scientist

"The important thing is not to stop questioning" – Albert Einstein

Just got ghosted for a demo call 👻

That's ok, it happens! 

I figured I'd use the time I got back to record a sweet little demo of Cycle App's most popular feature. 

It's called the feedback island and it's literally the fastest feedback capture ever created 🚲⚡️

Would love your feedback – should I share more demos like this one? 🤗

PS: thanks Bethany for the great idea – when I watched your demo I thought I'd do the same next time I have a "no show"! 

Mehdi Boudoukhane

As an early stage founder, your only job is to delight a small set of customers so much that they start telling their friends about it. 

Simple yet not easy. 

But wait, what's the role of your long term vision then? I'd say it's threefold:

1/ it helps you wake up in the morning and keep going even when you’re slapped in the face, which is basically all the time; 

2/ it helps with fundraising – VCs want to know that you’re highly ambitious and could return their entire fund one day;

3/ it helps recruit and retain great talent – folks need to be inspired by something bigger than the day-to-day grind.

Other than that… All that matters is getting to product-market fit 😈

Something huge is coming... 👀

Want to know what makes customers angry? 

Wonder what the main customer pain points are this quarter? 

Curious to learn what your top customers love about your product?

Just ask! 

Cycle App will browse through all of your customer feedback and give you an answer in no time 🤗

Products are like jokes. If you have to explain them, they're not that good. 

Whenever I find myself adding tooltips to explain a design, I try to remember that it's probably because my design sucks. 

Don't get me wrong, tooltips are great and I use them all the time. But an excessive need to use them often hides the inability to design a clear product. 

My tip: forget about tooltips. Is the product self-explanatory without them? Before you add tooltips, make sure the answer to this question is an unambiguous yes. 

Alright, that's cool, but how do you make a product self-explanatory? 

That's a great question and I'll write about it in my next post 😀 

Teaser: it involves object models and your product's dictionary 👀

Most products start simple but get bloated over time as new features are added.

But they don’t have to.

How do you maintain simplicity while adding new functionality? I have a trick for that:

Before thinking about the user experience, figure out what your product’s dictionary is. 

What’s the minimum set of new words people need to understand before using your product?

The smaller the product’s dictionary, the easier it is to understand.

So… How do you bring power while keeping your product simple? 

Just keep your product’s dictionary small!

Don’t throw new words at your UX challenges! Add features, yes, but don’t add concepts.

Whenever you add a new word, remember that you have to explain that word to users… And that the ramp to understand your product gets higher.

A great way to stay disciplined on that front is to be API-first. Think about how a feature impacts the API’s schema before you think about how it impacts screens. 

That’s it! Just keep your API simple… and your user experience will naturally remain simple too ✌️

"It's like a CRM but for the product team" 

That's the answer I received from one of our power users this morning when I asked "How would you describe Cycle?" 

I quite like it and it's accurate: Cycle does put Customers at the center of the product development lifecycle.  

In Cycle, you're always one shortcut away from any customer's profile – open it to access every feedback you got from that customer across all sources (Google Meet, Intercom, Slack, HubSpot, you name it). 

Bring the Customer in every product conversation. With Cycle App 💙

Share releases, not roadmaps.

“Don't tell people your plans. Show them your results.”

Talk is cheap. What counts is what you've actually built and shipped. Roadmaps change, but a release is proof you've moved the needle. 

In that spirit, we just released our new release feature (so much inception) 🎉

Have a look at Cycle's changelog... powered by Cycle 👀 

And you, what did you ship this week? 

We shipped a new pricing page. Without a price... What the hell!? 

Yeah, we know you want transparency, not a bullshit "it depends" – the thing is... it does depend. 

We're product folks ourselves and we love it when the pricing is transparent. But it just didn't work for us. Freemium/self-serve was not the right motion for Cycle. 

There are three reasons: 

1/ It's a product that has a long time to value. We haven't nailed a use case yet where the aha moment happens in the first 5 minutes.

2/ It's a very horizontal product that requires an organizational-level setup. The default workspace setup needs to be tweaked to fit the way a company wants to operate.

3/ We rely on external integrations as feedback sources. Feedback is always gathered through company channels, and folks who sign up don't always have the required permissions to connect new tools to their feedback sources like Slack.

Long story short, Cycle's pricing depends on your context. It varies based on the number of makers, the add-ons you need, and your billing period.

Contact us if you want to learn more about the product and get a personalized quote 🤗

Here's our (priceless) pricing page 👉 https://lnkd.in/epEsuEnW 

Ship less but better. 

Don’t dilute your efforts trying to do too much. Deliver a few features, but make them exceptional. Quality beats quantity every time in this game.

In doubt, reduce scope not quality. Always. 

It's by far our most important guiding principle at Cycle App 🚲

Cycle App's feedback autopilot keeps improving every week! 

On top of writing a product summary and extracting / categorizing customer quotes, you can now automate the creation of a new feature or problem. 

Let's take an example. 

In your latest Zoom call, a user mentioned that they're a night owl so they need a dark mode. 

Cycle will write the call transcript and extract the quote "My eyes hurt at night so would love a dark mode".

The feedback autopilot will then look for "Dark mode" in your roadmap and if it doesn't find anything, it will automatically create the feature for you. 

That's it ✌️ Ping me if you want to give the autopilot a try! 🤗

Activity is not always correlated with value. 

At Cycle App, we learned it the hard way with unexpected churns 😢 

Some teams were active on paper because they were capturing feedback on a continuous basis but they were churning anyway 🧐 We were lost! 

Then we realized these teams had set up feedback automations with Zapier so they were obviously capturing feedback... without even using the product! 

After digging further, we learned that the only teams that find value in Cycle are the ones that regularly extract insights out of the feedback they capture. 

Since then we changed our value metric and fixed our mysterious churn issues! 

Activity != Value

☝️ Remember this next time you iterate on your value metric

Trust > Prioritization

"I know everything in my head but making sure everyone else knows is a pain" 

We hear that all the time from product folks. 

The thing is it's not about knowing what to do (good PMs know what to do), it's about creating trust around what's being done. 

Feedback should be used as a tool to create trust, not as a way to prioritize. 

How do you create trust with feedback? By closing the feedback loop at each release – with Cycle App 🚲


A good feedback system is not linear, it's cyclical (yeah, that's why we're called Cycle App 🤫)

Capturing feedback is one thing, but being disciplined about closing the feedback loop at each release is a whole different ball game. 

If folks don’t know about it, did you even ship it? 🤷‍♀️

By closing the feedback loop with customers, you'll improve engagement, trust, and loyalty – ultimately leading to increased revenue.

New product updates in our latest changelog:

1. New UX for view navigation 🗺
Discover our new breadcrumb to navigate your views. From any view, just click on "Views" to get back there. You can also click on the view name to change views quickly. 

2. AI Feature creation customization ✅
You’ll find a new autopilot parameter in your AI settings “Create Insight”, allowing you to control whether the AI can create a new feature if it doesn't match existing ones in Cycle.

3. AI Product summary 📑
Transform long feedback into a crisp summary with a click!
This is automatically generated when enabled in your AI settings.

4. Source split chart in dashboard 📊
Understand where you get most of your feedback from. 

👉 Learn more and see other updates in our changelog:
https://lnkd.in/e9RiQFJt

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