Hackyard cut half its MVP features after 200+ user replies

A solo founder's product, Hackyard, launched with a huge feature set: a Twitter-style feed, public build logs, weekly ship reports, builder profiles, bookmarks, notifications, DMs, a reputation system, and founding-member badges. After launch, the founder collected over 200 replies across Reddit, email, and LinkedIn. Expected questions about growth or funding barely came up.

Instead, the actual messages were things like "how do I find customers," "I need a technical co-founder," "know any good designers," "I need someone who knows sales," and "I just want to meet builders working on similar stuff." The product had accidentally become a mashup of LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, and Discord, but people came for one single promise on the page: find the people you need to build with. Realizing this, the founder stopped treating the feed as the core product, dropped the focus on posts, likes, and doomscrolling, and simplified onboarding from a long walkthrough down to just two fields: what are you building, and who are you looking for.