Indie Hacker Diaries #31: Navigating Negative Feedback

One of the hardest things you’ll come up against when you build something is having to contend with negative feedback.

This week, unexpectedly, a response I made to a post on Hacker News promoting Joystick found me in a bit of back-and-forth with another developer. While I didn’t enjoy their tone, they did manage to point out a logical problem with how I’ve been handling escaping HTML (and how I was explaining it in the docs).

This got me thinking about all of you reading and listening to this. It’s hard enough to get your idea built, tested, and shipped, but dealing with real-world feedback is a whole other bag of chips.

Over the years, I’ve learned how to deal with negative feedback more constructively.

When I first started out, I would get defensive and a little choked up. I knew that, even on my earliest projects, I had sunk an insane amount of time and effort into what I was building. For someone to find an error? It felt like a deep, personal flaw had been pointed out.

But of course that wasn’t the case. No, what I’ve learned is that you get negative feedback for a range of reasons, some valid, others invalid:

1. There may be something legitimately wrong with what you’ve built. A bug, a clunky experience, or confusion caused by how a feature works.
2. Or, what you’ve built works great and for most people is satisfactory, but for some, it doesn’t quite fit right. They can’t articulate why that is, but they still make a point to let you know “this isn’t it.”
3. Or, the person isn’t terribly concerned with the work, but how you made them feel. This is typically rooted in feelings of envy, inadequacy, and a whole other host of emotions.

In all of the above cases, if you can tamp down your ego long enough, you can find some hidden gems in even the nastiest of feedback.

The best way to get control of yourself is to first know which one of the above you’re dealing with. Hedge fund investor Ray Dalio suggests in his book Principles that more often than not, when something happens, it’s happened before. He says:

“I was beginning to see things happening over and over again, which led me to see that most everything is ‘another one of those.’ Most everything has happened repeatedly before for logical cause-effect reasons.“

This is the approach I take to calm myself down when a particular bit of feedback starts to make my eye twitch.

First, identify if it’s “another one of those,” approximately, and take a beat before you respond. And that wording is key. You want to respond, not react.

Truth be told, my gut response to the feedback that prompted this week’s entry was “what the fuck is this guy’s problem?”

But having been down this road before and made that mistake (I like and used to liberally deploy Gordon Ramsay’s “when I hear bullshit, I go straight for the jugular” approach), I pumped the brakes.

“Oh, this is another one of those.”

Once I was calm, responding was straightforward. I responded to the criticism and waited. Then I got another response. And another.

Though the feedback was delivered as the glistening cherry on top of a heaping pile of emotionally-charged bleep, because I made a point to remain calm, I was able to filter out the noise and listen to the signal in the feedback.

And guess what? There was something there.

While I didn’t enjoy how it was presented, that discussion helped to illuminate a logical error in Joystick.

The issue was that even though I have a mechanism built-in to Joystick for handling HTML escaping on the server, what I should have done was to implement auto-escaping in Joystick’s component framework on the client and then allow a developer to conditionally work around it as their app requires.

I was doing the reverse of that, which means that if a developer forgets to escape something on the server, they could have a potential security hole at worst and a difficult to debug UI at best in their app. No bueno.

Even though my hair was a bit singed, ultimately, that other developer pointed out something important that I needed to fix before I sign off on a 1.0 release.

And this is why it’s absolutely important you develop a thick skin as you put your work out into the world. Though your grandma may think you can do no wrong, boy howdy are there a lot of other people on the planet who are more than happy to tell you why your work (and in some cases, you) are flawed.

No matter how it’s delivered, though, you have to train yourself to keep your cool.

Not just publicly, but privately, too.

Though this was jarring in the moment, once I had responded, I put it out of mind.

And that’s key.

Anybody who does creative work will tell you that even if 99% of the feedback you receive is positive, that tiny sliver that’s not can send you spiraling. You can get stuck on it. Even if you lack a narcissistic “I can do no wrong” personality, you can still get snared.

This is why it’s important to realize feedback for what it is: feedback. Generally speaking, feedback is just someone’s opinion. It’s subjective.

And more importantly, it rarely if ever has anything to do with you.

The way I (jokingly) explain it to my fiancé: when you get a particularly gritty piece of feedback, it’s not about you; it’s about mommy or daddy. This clip from the Adam Sandler movie Big Daddy ties it up in a bow:

Jokes aside, the point is recognize that negative feedback is a tar pit. It’s a distraction from what you should be doing: either improving based on that feedback, or, continuing on your original path.

What you shouldn’t do is let it get to you. The mantra?

Water off a duck’s back.

Even if it upsets you in the moment, don’t carry it with you. If you do, it can prevent you from getting better and wasting time plotting your revenge.

Just accept that it’s okay to get things wrong. It’s okay to mess up. It’s okay to not be Grandma’s Perfect Little Angel. Just focus on figuring out what you can do to improve, navigating the feedback gracefully, and move on.

To cement the point, I’m going to leave you with one of my all time favorite videos: Steve Jobs responding to a heckler at Apple’s 1997 WWDC event.

The takeaway line?

“You can please some of the people, some of the time.”