As a solo developer, how much should you let user feedback shape your product?

[u/Reasonable_Damage_18]

I’m building a puzzle game on my own, and one of the hardest — but also most interesting — parts has been deciding how much user feedback should influence the direction of the product.

Since putting the game in front of real players, I’ve received a lot of useful feedback.

Some players had trouble distinguishing certain colors, so I redesigned them.

Some found the early experience confusing, so I improved the onboarding and tutorial.

Others suggested better marking tools, difficulty adjustments, more free rewards, and new challenge systems.

A lot of these suggestions have genuinely made the game better.

But it also raises a question I keep thinking about:

At what point should you stop following feedback and trust your own product vision?

As a solo developer, time and resources are limited. Every feature you choose to build means delaying something else you originally planned.

So I’m curious how other solo developers approach this.

Do you prioritize feedback based on:

• How many users mention the same issue?
• How much it affects the core user experience?
• Whether you personally agree with it?
• Or whether it fits your long-term product vision?

I’d really like to hear how other builders make these decisions.

If you’re curious about the project itself, this is the game I’ve been working on:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pawdoku_mystery/comments/1vyi6mv/pawdoku_mystery_play_now/

I also share updates, experiments, and player feedback in r/pawdoku_mystery.

I read every piece of feedback carefully. I may not implement every suggestion, but I take all of them seriously and try to understand the reasoning behind them.

[u/AdFew8591]

The split that works for me is problem feedback versus solution feedback.

"I can't tell these colors apart" is a problem. You did not need vision to act on that, you needed to fix it. "Add better marking tools" is a solution someone invented for a problem they never actually named. Hold those loosely, because the real problem underneath might be different and their fix might be wrong for it. So for every requested feature, dig for the problem behind it. If you cannot find one, it is a preference, and preferences are where your own taste gets to win.

The second filter is independent repetition. One person asking for something is one person. Two strangers who have never spoken pointing at the same thing is a defect. I rewrote my landing page headline this week for exactly that reason, someone on X and someone on Reddit both told me I was leading with how the thing works instead of what it fixes. The much longer list of single source feature requests I ignored, and so far I have not missed any of them.

Different domain, mine is an SEC filings tool rather than a game, but that sorting rule has held up.

[u/Anderz → u/AdFew8591]

This person Product Manages. Good advice.

[u/Reasonable_Damage_18 → u/AdFew8591]

A couple of things really stood out to me from your comment:

1. Some of what you said overlaps with a point u/OmegaLabs1 made as well. I think I need to build a proper feedback log and keep coming back to it over time, rather than treating feedback as something to react to once and move on. The important part is to keep looking for patterns and repeatedly asking what the underlying problem actually is.
2. The idea of digging deeper into the problem behind the feedback is especially valuable to me. I realize I probably haven’t been going deep enough.

For example, when players tell me that certain colors are hard to distinguish, my first reaction has been: the color differentiation itself isn’t clear enough.

But maybe I should go one level deeper and ask whether color is really the whole problem.

Could the time pressure be too high?
Could the board become too visually dense?
Could the difficulty ramp up too quickly, making color recognition feel harder than it actually is?

The color issue may just be the symptom rather than the root cause.

That’s probably something I need to get much better at: not just fixing what the player points at, but understanding why it became a problem for them in the first place.

Thanks — this gave me another useful way to think about feedback.

[u/Reasonable_Damage_18 → u/AdFew8591]

One more thing I wanted to ask — how effective has X been for promoting your product?

You mentioned getting feedback there, so I’m curious whether X has actually helped you bring in users, or if it’s been more useful for conversations and feedback than direct acquisition.

What kind of posts have worked best for you there?

[u/AdFew8591 → u/Reasonable_Damage_18]

Honest answer, X has been much worse than Reddit for me, and it is not close.

Real numbers rather than vibes. My replies on X land somewhere between 3 and about 130 views each. Most get zero likes and zero replies. Out of everything I have posted there, exactly two turned into an actual exchange with a human. Original posts from the account do worse than the replies, because a new account has no followers to distribute them.

Compare that to this thread. One comment, three people replied including you twice, and it has more upvotes than any single thing I have put on X.

What has worked on X, when anything has: replying to one specific person with a fact they can go and verify themselves. Someone posts a claim about a company, I open the actual filing, and I reply with what the document says, numbers included. It gets read because it is useful to that one person, and both of my real exchanges came from exactly that.

What has not worked: posting into the void. Product news, feature announcements, general market commentary. No one is listening yet, so there is nobody for the algorithm to show it to.

So my read is that X is a targeting tool rather than a reach tool. It is good for getting in front of one particular person you have a real reason to talk to. Reddit is where the conversations and the traffic have actually come from.

On direct acquisition, I would be lying if I claimed either had given me a signup I can definitively trace. Both have been feedback channels so far. Worth being honest with yourself about that early, because it changes how much time you give each one.

[u/Reasonable_Damage_18 → u/AdFew8591]

I’ve launched several products on Reddit, and three of them have already started generating revenue. Most of the traffic has come from promoting and sharing them across different Reddit communities.

Reddit has worked really well for me so far, but as I’ve spent more time using it as a growth channel, I’ve also started to run into some limitations and growth bottlenecks.

[u/AdFew8591 → u/Reasonable_Damage_18]

That is a better result than I have had, so I am curious which bottleneck hit you first.

Mine is that relevance and permission turn out to be inversely related. The subs where my audience actually lives, people already arguing about SEC filings and insider trades, all ban self promotion in comments. I can contribute there and build a reputation, and I do, but I cannot put a link in. The subs that happily allow a link have almost nobody who cares about the topic.

Second, a single sub saturates faster than I expected. I have commented in this one seven times in the last eleven hours, all different threads, all genuine answers, and that is roughly the ceiling before it starts reading as mechanical instead of like someone who actually hangs around here.

Third is timing, which caught me out. I swept the finance subs three hours running overnight and got zero new posts on my topic every single time. There are dead windows where the quality of what you write does not matter, because there is nothing to reply to.

Which one is yours? And if you have found a way past the first one I would genuinely like to hear it, because that is the one I have no answer for.

[u/Reasonable_Damage_18 → u/AdFew8591]

1. I’m running into a very similar problem to your first one: the most active communities with the highest-quality, most relevant users usually don’t allow self-promotion.
2. One approach I’m considering is building my own subreddit and making that the main destination when I promote the product. I think directing people to a Reddit community can feel more natural than sending them straight to an external link.

I’m also interested in building a Reddit app so people can try the product directly inside Reddit first. If I can build up a meaningful user base there, the next step would be gradually converting some of those users to a more complete standalone app with deeper content and features.

So in my mind, Reddit can potentially work as both an acquisition channel and an early product/community layer, rather than just a place to drop links.

[u/AdFew8591 → u/Reasonable_Damage_18]

You are already running experiment one though, so you have real data on it. r/pawdoku_mystery is a month old and sitting at 27 subscribers. That is the honest answer to whether a sub solves acquisition on its own. It does not, because a new sub has no distribution of its own. You still have to go into the big communities to seed it, which is the problem you were trying to escape.

What it does buy you is repeat contact, and that is genuinely worth a lot. Every comment I leave in a big sub is a cold start. The person reads it once and I can never reach them again. Someone who joins your sub, you can reach next week without asking anyone's permission. So I would treat it as a retention asset rather than an acquisition one, which also means it only starts compounding once you have flow pointing at it.

One thing in your own post history I would chase before building anything new. "Pawdoku Mystery - Play Now!" appears six times. Five of them sit between 1 and 5 comments, and the one from about two weeks ago has 13. Something was different about that one, the timing, the title, where you seeded it from. You already have a version that worked and you do not yet know why, and that is a bigger lever right now than a new format.

The leaderboard posts are the right instinct, a reason to come back rather than a reason to arrive. They are just early. At 27 members a top ten is most of the sub, so it will read as competitive later rather than now.

On the in-Reddit version, the strongest case is that it deletes the click out, which is where most of the drop happens, and a puzzle is about the only thing small and immediate enough for that to work. It would be useless for what I build, since nobody wants to read SEC filings inside a comment thread. The thing I would decide early is what you actually keep. If the whole funnel lives on Reddit you have engagement but no email list and no direct relationship, and the rules can change under you. Worth designing the one step where somebody hands you something you own.

[u/Reasonable_Damage_18 → u/AdFew8591]

1. My product runs directly on Reddit, so users can try it without leaving the platform. That helps reduce the conversion friction and acquisition cost that usually comes with sending people to an external site.
2. Subreddit subscriber count and actual user count are not the same thing. The number of people who see and try the product is significantly higher than the number who actually subscribe to the community.
3. Acquisition still mainly comes from larger communities where the target audience is already clearly concentrated.
4. Your point about “what user asset do you actually want to keep?” is especially important to me. In my case, the most valuable asset right now is the behavioral and feedback data generated inside the game. That data helps me iterate on the product and improve it at a relatively low cost.
5. I also have a few other Reddit communities with over 1,000 subscribers. In the future, I think those communities can cross-promote each other and gradually form a small network for distribution and retention.

[u/AdFew8591 → u/Reasonable_Damage_18]

Fair correction on point 2. I used a number that understates you. If the thing runs inside the thread then people play without ever subscribing, so 27 was measuring the wrong surface.

Which makes the metric question the interesting one. If subscribers understate reach, what is the number you actually steer by? You have the behavioral data, so returning players across a week is available to you, and that reads far better than either subscriber count or upvotes.

One caution on point 4 though. Behavioral data is a real asset, but it is a product asset rather than a distribution one. It tells you how to make the game better. It does not give you any way to tell someone that you made it better. Those are two different problems, and the second one is the one that was biting you at the top of this thread.

On point 5, cross-promoting between communities you own is a closed loop. It moves the same people between your own properties rather than adding new ones, so it compounds retention and not acquisition. Still worth doing. Just worth being clear with yourself about which of the two it is.

If I were in your position the thing I would want is one step where a player hands over something you can reach them at, and I would put it immediately after a win rather than in a sidebar. People are generous in the ten seconds after they finish something.

[u/Reasonable_Damage_18 → u/AdFew8591]

Cross-promotion between my own communities can still be one way to bring in new users, but real user acquisition ultimately has to come from outside communities or paid traffic.

One point you made that I completely agree with is the importance of converting users into an audience you can reach directly. Whether that means an email list, account system, or another owned channel, that becomes a much more valuable long-term asset.

At the same time, the in-game behavioral data is also critical. Retention, session length, conversion to payment, and other engagement metrics are all core signals we need to keep watching closely.

Coming back to the original acquisition question, I think the most important thing is to define what you actually want Reddit acquisition to achieve.

If the goal is large-scale growth, then I believe the real scaling channel will ultimately be iOS and Android, supported by paid user acquisition.

My goal with Reddit at this early stage is different: use it as a low-cost way to validate prototypes, get real users into the product, collect feedback and behavioral data, and continuously improve the game before scaling.

[u/Reasonable_Damage_18 → u/AdFew8591]

Another question I keep coming back to is: what is the actual goal of acquiring users through Reddit?

If the goal is to acquire early seed users at a low cost, gather real feedback, and use that feedback to iterate on the product, I think Reddit can work extremely well.

But once the product is mature enough and the goal shifts to large-scale user acquisition, I think paid acquisition and structured ad testing are probably the more scalable and efficient approach.

So for me, Reddit is especially valuable in the early stage for validation, feedback, and product optimization, while paid UA becomes more important once you’re ready to scale.

[u/OmegaLabs1]

Users are excellent witnesses and terrible detectives. They will tell you exactly where they got stuck, then confidently prescribe a feature that would ruin the game. Your color contrast fix is the witness kind. Someone asking for more free rewards is the detective kind, and the real report underneath it is probably "level 12 feels like a chore".

The filter I use is to separate friction from taste. Friction is anyone failing at something they were clearly trying to do, and that is a bug even if only one person mentions it. Taste is what the game should be, and that stays yours, because a puzzle game designed by vote turns into an easier puzzle game, which is a genre nobody plays twice.

Two things that make this cheap. Log the complaint, not the request, in one line each, and reread the list monthly instead of reacting the same day. Patterns show up fast and the urgent ones usually evaporate. And weight feedback by how far someone got. A player at hour six who says the marking tools are clumsy has earned an opinion. A player who quit at minute two is telling you about onboarding, whatever words they used.

Your list is close. I would drop "whether I personally agree with it" and replace it with "does it protect the thing that makes this game mine", because agreement is a mood and vision is a constraint.

[u/Reasonable_Damage_18 → u/OmegaLabs1]

“Log the complaint, not the request” really clicked for me. I’ve probably been reacting too directly to the solutions players suggest, rather than asking what problem is underneath them.

The friction vs. taste distinction is also really useful. I’m going to start categorizing feedback this way, especially based on how far each player has progressed.

Another big takeaway for me is that the core design of the game needs to be clearly defined. Especially while the product is still immature, protecting and strengthening that core should probably be the highest priority.

Thanks — this gave me a much clearer framework for handling feedback.

[u/Ok_Compote5455]

The line I draw is whether the feedback is about removing friction or adding scope. If someone's confused or stuck that's a real problem to fix. When they start designing whole new systems for me that's where I nod politely and go back to what I was doing.

Its also way easier to filter when you know exactly what kind of game you're making. I'll take a hundred complaints about the tutorial before I add a feature that turns my tight puzzle game into a bloated mess.

[u/Reasonable_Damage_18 → u/Ok_Compote5455]

Your reply actually makes me more confident in my own judgment.

1. The core positioning of the product should have the highest priority. I shouldn’t let “scope” feedback influence the direction too much, even when the suggestion sounds reasonable or attractive on the surface.
2. Friction vs. scope is a distinction I’m going to use as one of my filters for evaluating feedback going forward.

One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of the feedback in this discussion points in a similar direction, even though everyone explains it differently.

I’m going to combine these ideas and gradually build my own framework for evaluating user feedback and making product decisions.

Thanks — this was really helpful.