The feature I almost shipped that would have killed retention

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Three weeks ago I was about to ship unlimited saves on the free tier. The logic seemed solid: remove friction, get more people in, convert later.

Then I asked myself a question I’d been avoiding: why do people open a read-later app and immediately close it?

The answer isn’t that they forgot about their saved articles. It’s that they have 200 of them, and opening the app feels like staring at a backlog they’ll never clear.

The constraint is the product

The 30-item monthly save cap I shipped instead is genuinely annoying to some people. But the people who stick around after hitting it read more than anyone else on the platform.

Constraints create intentionality. When you can save anything, you save everything.

Why I'm building in public

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

People treat “building in public” like it’s a marketing strategy. Post your MRR, share your losses, get engagement. That’s fine, but it’s not why I’m doing it.

I’m building in public because I’m bad at lying to myself in writing.

The real accountability is internal

When you have to articulate where something stands — in a tweet, a blog post, a Discord message — you can’t hide from the reality of it. You have to name it.

Last week I had 14 signups and 0 conversions. When it was just a number in a spreadsheet, I told myself “early days, not worried.” When I wrote it out, I had to sit with: why 0 conversions?

The audience that matters

One person reads everything I post: future me. If I write something that holds up when I look back at it in six months, I did it right.

Everyone else is just a little bonus.

Connor Baskauskas

The feature I almost shipped that would have killed retention

The constraint is the product

Why I'm building in public

The real accountability is internal

The audience that matters