Bad feedback should make you happy.

Do not index

Most people are terrified of negative feedback.

“What will people think” ”What if my product sucks” ”What if I make a fool of myself”

Scared enough to never ship, never post, never ask.

After building 6 businesses to $1m/month, let me tell you this:

Not getting feedback is FAR worse than bad feedback.

Here’s how to read feedback, change your mindset, and set yourself up for success 👇🏼

The mindset shift

When someone takes time to criticize your product, that's usually a good sign.

They care enough to want it to work

There's friction right now, but they stuck around long enough to notice it

You have something worth having an opinion about

And maybe, they will stick around if that problem gets solved (answers “what should I ship next” 👀)

The scary outcome from being public isn't harsh feedback.

It's nothing at all. Silence.

Because that means nobody cares. Can’t fight that.

Not all feedback deserves attention

Before you let a comment ruin your day, check one thing first:

“Is this person even in my target audience?”

Someone outside your ICP complaining tells you nothing.

Their opinion doesn't reflect whether the product works for the people it's actually built for.

Someone inside your ICP complaining is gold. That's the only feedback we care about.

Filter by source before you filter by tone.

Don’t react to how something was said. First, check if the person saying it even matters to the business.

What actually happened with Bazzly

Bazzly.ai is my newest venture (more about this in a later edition). I joined the project back in June.

It’s a Reddit marketing platform.

Opened it to 10 people. Shared it with a bunch more.

Nobody said anything.

*crickets*

That's worse than bad feedback. Nothing interesting enough to comment on.

People don't even know what to say because nothing stood out.

So we changed things. Working with Philippe and Tom, here's what we did:

Rebuilt it to run on autopilot

Made the quality roughly 10x better

Started providing our own high karma accounts

Now when I share it with people over DM, I actually hear back.

Sometimes they absolutely love it. Sometimes they criticize things.

That's a good thing now, because it means the product finally has enough substance for people to engage with it.

We closed signups 6 weeks after opening.

Demand went past what we could serve well. Bazzly runs on real, high karma Reddit accounts. They're expensive to run properly. Spreading them too thin kills the quality.

So we stopped taking money to protect the results instead of chasing growth.

This could be my next $100k/month product (will keep you all posted!)

But we didn't just wait around for the silence to end.

We went and manufactured the feedback ourselves.

1 - Watched people try to use it 2 - Talked to people directly 3 - Got on calls

This worked way better than waiting for a DM that might never come.

Go get the feedback. Don't wait for it to show up.

That’s honestly a lot of your job as a founder.

To ship once, and do everything possible to get feedback from users. Then you build on that feedback. That’s your product roadmap.

My feedback handling framework

Every time someone finds a bug or complains, I ask myself one question:

“Is there something real here I can fix?”

If yes, that's the whole job. Fix it.

If someone's just being unpleasant with nothing useful attached, that's noise. And you can’t let noise stay for too long if you have to stay in business.

My rough process when feedback comes in:

Check if this person is in my ICP

Read it once without reacting

Separate the tone from the actual content

Ask if there's a real fix hiding in there

If yes, fix it and move on

If no, let it go completely

That's it. No overthinking or taking it personally.

Follow this and let me know if this helped you.

If you're sitting on something you haven't shared because you're scared of what people will say, that fear is backwards.

The thing to actually be scared of is putting it out there and hearing nothing back.

Go ship!

Reply and tell me 👇🏼

In 1 word, what's your first reaction when you see negative feedback?

I read all my emails and reply often!

Life of an Indie Maker #11

No weekly series this week :(

Instead, here's what's happening to SaaS now:

Tweet of the week

Imagine giving him Claude code and Codex 😅🤣

Until next week,

Keep building

Tibo 💻

P.S. If you want a Reddit account sending you customers on autopilot, Bazzly.ai's waitlist is open. We closed signups once already because we grew faster than we could serve well. Check out the website and tell me what you think.