1. Wrote and optimized DreamList https://www.dreamlist.com https://www.dreamlist.com (solo founder) in Go for the fastest Time to First Byte so it naturally out

1. Wrote and optimized DreamList https://www.dreamlist.com https://www.dreamlist.com (solo founder) in Go for the fastest Time to First Byte so it naturally outranks much better funded and staffed competitors in SEO. Some other tricks: 2. Channel many normally automated tasks through high touch customer service - encourage users and their guests to email us about anything and everything. We've learned tremendously from user feedback and by responding often within an hour, we've earned a lot user loyalty. One example was a grandmother who wanted to buy a gift for her grandchild, but the linked item was out of stock. She called the DreamList customer number straight to the founder. We found a different store for her to buy from. Now we have a product graph at different major stores and more leverage as a business. 3. Watch for user culture as well as team culture. A small set of users may find your site tremendously useful, and another small set may find it useful for malicious purposes (such as spamming people to sign up for some scam using your invitation forms, for example). We track all errors, log email bounces, etc, and wait a while before opening features that can be abused (including payments). Max Levchin has a story about how abuse and the 90 day payment refund process almost sank PayPal and they had millions in the bank. 4. Don't assume anything is a "best" approach. Try out counterintuitive measures and you will find ways to beat the competition far cheaper. Examples: Using Go when competitors use Rails and you need far less servers to handle the same number of users with a faster experience; We also invented several new words to test how pages with static content, vs JS painted built-in JSON, vs JS painted with external JSON do on SEO. We then leave the test going and re-check our assumptions periodically. I'd underline the last sentence for companies using JS frameworks - some slow you down more than they help. 5. Any new feature is launched and customer-serviced manually until we know we are serving those users in the best way possible. We went through a bunch of different wordings for every single email in our usual workflow, and little things, like an extra sentence that shows your humanity, made a huge difference. There is so much more you can do, but the gist is there are dozens of approaches to every feature and problem, and it's worth considering more than one or two used by competitors. It doesn't take much to delight users and build a better product these days.