Kosshi has been getting a wild amount of feedback
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Lately, the feedback for Kosshi coming in through the contact form has been getting a bit wild.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, hardly anyone outside Japan was using Kosshi, so when I put it on Product Hunt my expectations were honestly pretty light — something like "maybe the numbers will tick up a little."
Then this week, a longtime overseas outliner user, macosxguru, wrote about it on Bicycle For Your Mind, and that post made its way onto outlinersoftware.com, a forum dedicated to outliner enthusiasts (I tried to write something there myself, but posts apparently need approval first).
From there, another wave of overseas users came in, and the inquiry volume shifted into a completely different scale from the week before.
Every message is dense. Almost all of them follow the same pattern: "I think this is a good product. But there's room for improvement." And reading them, I keep finding myself nodding along, genuinely impressed. The spots I'd quietly suspected were weak in Kosshi — along with bugs I honestly hadn't even noticed — are almost always the exact ones that get pointed at.
I'd noticed something similar back when I was getting reports from Japanese users, too: seasoned outliner users are unusually articulate. They describe clearly what's going wrong, what's bothering them, and how it should behave instead. The reports often come with specific repro steps and concrete suggestions.
Compared to the other products I've worked on, this feedback is in a different league. The people using Kosshi right now are seriously looking for a tool, and after years of experience they already have a clear sense of how it should be.
I'm grateful — and yet, reading one, taking it in, reproducing the bug if there's one, prioritizing, writing a reply, then the next, and the next: it eats up a serious chunk of time. For about two days, I was pretty much doing nothing but this.
I have some completely unrelated work running in parallel, and I found myself sending those folks notes like "I'm sorry, could you wait a bit, until things settle on Kosshi?"
Over the last few days the volume has finally eased, and only now am I able to sit down and write something on my own time.
The backlog of unfixed bugs and outstanding requests for Kosshi is already pretty large. For a while, I'll be focused on working through that and shipping fix releases.
This is something to be grateful for — and yet, I've started to get a little jumpy thinking about what happens if even more inquiries arrive on top of all this. The reports are genuinely worth addressing, and on top of that, people often kindly say there's no rush. But if much more piles on, I might not have enough hands to keep up.
When I put Kosshi on Product Hunt last week, I was thinking, "it'd be nice if it started getting used outside Japan too." Less than a week later, that's flipped over to "wait — if this spreads any further, this might become more than I can handle." Kosshi right now isn't in a "spread it further" phase. It's in a "use this feedback to improve" phase.
I haven't been running ads, so it's not as if I'm actively stopping anything. But beyond what naturally spreads by word of mouth, I think I'll hold off on pushing.
A quiet aside — I've mentioned it in another post, but there was a period when I was working on an in-house startup at a company, and a mentor-like figure told us, "For a new venture, the first thing you aim for is PMF." After that, I caught myself saying "PMF" out loud almost every day while building. Product-market fit, product-market fit. The project ended without me ever being able to clearly tell whether we'd reached it or not.
I get it now. That really wasn't PMF after all.
What PMF actually means — I think it might be this kind of state, coming into focus. To put it more simply: it might be the point at which it stops being something only you are making.
A little more concretely — with so many suggestions and bug reports coming in, it's started to feel less like I'm finding things to do, and more like the work itself is being generated from the outside. Ideas I never would have come up with on my own, bugs I never would have caught — they keep surfacing, and in a way, I'm no longer making this entirely on my own. Put another way: the people using Kosshi are helping me with the building process itself, which is genuinely something to be grateful for.
For the people already using Kosshi, I'd like to focus on improving it for a while.
A small note at the end — going on too much about how rough it's been might leave the impression that I'd rather people not send feedback at all, but that's not what I mean. If you're already using Kosshi, your feedback is very much welcome. Please feel free to get in touch.
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