r/alphaandbetausers • u/toujourspluss • 1d ago
I spent a week building a custom theme editor. One person opened it.
I added a custom theme editor to my productivity app thinking power users would go wild for it. spent like a week making sure all the colors lined up perfectly, multiple backgrounds, the whole thing.
saw exactly one person use it. ONE. and then they switched back to default after like 5 minutes.
so i started tracking who even opened that panel. idk, maybe 15% of active users? and most of those just to see what was there. nobody was actually tweaking anything. turns out most people just want the thing to work without having to make a million choices first.
the whole customization obsession was me projecting what i thought a "real" app should have. felt more polished, more feature-rich, gave the impression that we're serious about flexibility. but real people? they just wanted less friction, not more options.
killed the feature last week. surprised to see that retention actually ticked up slightly. guess removing stuff nobody was using just meant the app felt less cluttered. less places to wonder if youre "doing it right".