I pivoted the entire app after brutal feedback

👟 Topic: I pivoted the entire app after brutal feedback

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Last week I told you about watching users break my app and rebuilding the experience based on what I learned.

This week I killed the feature I built the entire product around.

Let me explain.

After the last round of updates, I kept doing user interviews. I wanted to understand not just how people were using SayMail, but how they felt using it.

And the feedback on the voice-to-email feature? It wasn't great.

Most users felt awkward recording themselves to generate an email. The whole talk-to-write workflow that I thought would be the magic of SayMail? People just didn't like it.

Some said it felt unnatural. Others said they weren't sure what to say. A few tried it once and never used it again.

This was the core of the product. The thing I named the app after. SayMail. You say your email.

And users were telling me they didn't want to.

But while it wasn’t great news, it was the biggest signal I’ve gotten so far.

I remembered a piece of advice I'd seen from experienced founders:

Don't force a new behavior. Make what your users are already doing easier.

So instead of spiraling, I just asked a simple question: "What do you currently do when you need to cold email someone?"

The answers were pretty consistent:

Most people use a combination of LinkedIn, pre-written email templates, and ChatGPT. They'd find someone on LinkedIn, copy their info, paste a template into an LLM, tweak the output, and send.

It's clunky, but it works. And it's what they're already comfortable with.

Now here's the thing. If someone can ask ChatGPT to write an email based off a template in 30 seconds, there's no world where they'd spend a minute or two recording themselves saying the same thing out loud.

The voice feature wasn't solving a problem. It was creating friction.

So I killed it

I completely removed the voice-to-email feature.

No more recording. No more awkward pauses wondering what to say into your phone.

And with that change came something bigger: a full rebrand.

SayMail is now Pingem (pronounced "ping-em").

Instead of voice notes, Pingem uses smart templates to draft emails. You pick a template, the app fills in the context from the contact you selected, and you get a polished cold email in seconds.

It's faster. It's more familiar. And it meets users exactly where they already are.

I'm now testing this new workflow with more users to see if it performs better than the original.

The hypothesis is simple: if the biggest friction point was the voice input, and we've removed it in favor of something users already understand, engagement should go up.

But I'm not assuming anything. I said last week I was going back to "doing things that don't scale," and that hasn't changed. I'm still in people's DMs, still hopping on calls, still watching session recordings like a hawk.

The product works different now, but the mission is the same: make cold outreach less painful for job seekers.

Maybe sometimes building the right thing means destroying the thing you thought was right.

That’s all for today. If you enjoyed this post, share it with a friend!

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See you next Tuesday 🤝

-Michael Ly

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