Playbooks

Cut your product down to the one feature users love

A playbook for early products: talk to your first users one by one, find the single feature they care about most, then remove most of the rest and rebuild the product around it.

The hard part: talking to enough users to see clearly which feature they value, then letting go of the parts you spent months building.

Setup 1 monthRuns $20/moYour time Most daysReadiness Readiness 50 out of 100Some detailHow we score thisNeeds ClaudeAirtable

Who pays

This is a method, not a product, so it earns through whatever you already sell, by turning a do-everything tool into one clear offer people will pay for. andreyfateev77 reports that a marketing tool called Cassius AI was cut down to its short-form video feature and relaunched as Fastlane, which reportedly reached $69K MRR and 1,000+ paying users within roughly two months of its launch post. These figures are reported, not verified.

How to build it

  1. Get a first group of users

    Bring in early users any way you can, such as posts on X, Reddit threads, and a free guide in exchange for an email.

  2. Talk to users one by one

    Book short calls with as many users as you can and ask which part of the product they actually use and would miss most.

  3. Log every call in Airtable

    Record the features each user mentions and how strongly they feel about them in an Airtable base.

  4. Find the standout feature

    Paste your call notes into Claude and ask it to group what users said by feature, so you can see which one comes up far more than the rest.

  5. Cut and rebuild around it

    Remove or hide most other features and rebuild the product, its name, and its promise around the one users care about. Claude Code can speed up the rebuild.

  6. Relaunch with a clear offer

    Launch the focused product publicly with a simple promise of what it does for the customer, and keep talking to users as it grows.

Sources on X

  • andreyfateev77 · Sep 25, 2026

    andreyfateev77 describes how the founders of Cassius AI, which tried to cover SEO, Reddit marketing, AI search visibility, and short-form content, found from talking to users that people cared far more about generating short-form video. They cut most of the product, rebuilt around that feature from around October, held around 2,000 customer calls, and launched Fastlane in March 2026. The poster says it reportedly reached $69K MRR and 1,000+ paying users within roughly two months.

Ideas are curated from public posts and untested by us. Read the full note.