JotBot has too many features

Everyone tells you that you shouldn’t add too many features to your product.

But no one tells you what to do when you’ve already added too many features to your product.

That’s where Declan, Phillip, and I are at with JotBot.

We have three use cases: AI-Assisted writing, Draft Generation, and Note Taking.

The direction we think has the most potential, and are most excited for is AI-assisted writing. But we have relatively no data behind this.

Initially, JotBot went viral for draft generation (20m+ views) and we have a good chunk of users using it and paying for it.

We added Note Taking a month or so in, and went even more viral (60m+ views) — people are using and paying for that too.

So cutting these two features and significantly hurt our existing user base seems extreme.

Currently, though, new users get confused by the array of options they’re given and can’t intuitively get to what they want with the product.

We thought about trying to funneling users into the features we’re focusing on, but we’re worried users who come for a specific use case might be thrown off.

We also considered splitting the product into new, separate products, but creating a smooth transition to multiple products would take up much of our precious time before summer break comes.

Quite frankly, the three of us are in a time crunch — if we don’t see progress by summer, it’s likeley we’ll have to go back to school.

We’ve been avoiding this problem for a while, but this kind of situation only gets worse the longer we wait.

It’s pretty clear now that we’re going to have to take some less-than-optimal moves and really focus on what we want amongst:

• Staying lean

• Keeping our users happy

• Taking JotBot into an exciting direction.

We’re starting some experiments and we’ll report back with the results.

Stay tuned 🫡