Putting Yourself Out There

We publicly launched Attrove this October.

The night before, I couldn’t sleep. Not because of technical anxiety…our infrastructure was solid. I was terrified of silence. What if we launched and nobody cared?

I feared the wrong thing. Silence is merciful; feedback has teeth. You only find out how you’ll perform when reality answers back—and reality speaks in feedback.

Here’s what I learned over 14 years at Apple and now building Attrove: feedback isn’t what derails you; it’s what saves you. The people who learn this fastest? They win.

What Feedback Actually Means

Before we go further, let's get clear on terms. Because most people, including past me, misunderstand what feedback actually is.

Early in my Apple career, I despised the word "feedback." Hearing "I've got some feedback for you" felt like a punch in the gut. Nine times out of ten, it was followed by "you missed the mark" or "that wasn't done very well." Ew.

But after some transformative communication training, I realized something critical: most people conflate feedback with opinion. They're not the same thing.

Opinion: "Your slide was great!"
Feedback: "Your slide outlining last quarter's performance had visual simplicity that made the data easy to parse in under 30 seconds."

See the difference? One makes you feel good for a moment (often platitudes). The other tells you what worked and why, so you can replicate it.

The first is noise. The second is signal. And in a world drowning in noise, signal is everything (sound familiar?).

The Philosophy: Why Feedback Is Your Secret Weapon

Ray Dalio's Radical Truth

Bridgewater Associates didn't become the world's largest hedge fund (managing $160 billion) by accident. Ray Dalio built it on a radical premise: transparency beats hierarchy.¹

At Bridgewater, being truthful and transparent ensures important issues surface instead of festering in the shadows. When you must explain your reasoning, everyone can assess the merits of your logic. There's a famous story of a young employee rating Dalio's performance in a meeting as poor—to his face, in front of everyone. His response? "Tell me more."

This isn't masochism. It's competitive advantage.

Feedback isn't about protecting your ego. It's about finding truth faster than your competition can. And in markets where milliseconds matter, finding truth first means winning.

John Boyd's OODA Loop

Speed as competitive advantage. Sound familiar?

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War was one of my top reads this year; a timeless biography of an unsung aviation hero published over 20 years ago. Boyd intuitively understood what I was just beginning to grasp: everything is feedback loops.

He developed the OODA Loop framework: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. An entity that can process this cycle quickly, observing and reacting to unfolding events faster than an opponent, gets inside the opponent's decision cycle and gains decisive advantage.

Here's the critical insight: operating at a higher tempo isn't about frenetic speed. It's about tightening feedback loops.

In aerial combat, if you can anticipate your opponent's next move just slightly faster, every single time, you eventually win. The same principle applies everywhere: in business, in product development, in careers. Fast learners win.

For startups, this manifests simply: solicit and implement feedback slightly quicker than your competition. Iterate just a little bit faster, over and over again. Compound that advantage across months and years? Good things happen.

The question isn't whether you need feedback. It's whether you'll get it fast enough to make it matter.

The Personal: 14 Years of Feedback at Apple

Early Years: Resistance

It’s 2012. I'm sitting in a glass conference room in Cupertino, seven levels deep in the org chart. My manager closes his laptop (never a good sign) and says, "I have some feedback."

My shoulders tense. My mind races through the presentation I'd given that morning, cataloging every potential mistake.

"Your data in that meeting was... too much. Your plots looked like math vomit and nobody could follow along."

I wanted to argue. My plots showed everything clearly! But something made me pause. Maybe it was the training I'd just completed, or maybe it was exhaustion with my own defensiveness.

"Tell me more," I said instead.

He did. And it stung. But more importantly, it clicked. I wasn't actually trying to find the best solution—I was trying to win the conversation. Months later, when I changed my approach, I started getting clear nods from the room. My ideas were gaining traction. I never would have gotten there with my old pattern.

That was my first real lesson: feedback isn't an attack on your competence. It's a shortcut to getting better.

Mid-Career: Seeking It Out

By my seventh year, something shifted. I stopped waiting for the annual 360-degree review and started hunting for feedback, hungry for it.

After project meetings: "What was most effective about how I facilitated that? What did I miss?"
After presentations: "Were my slide messages clear? Which parts do you remember?"
After exec reviews: "Was the data presented clearly? How could I have helped you understand it more quickly?"

Most people gave terrible feedback at first: vague platitudes or overly harsh criticism without specifics. But I learned to probe: "Can you give me an example?" "What specifically should I do differently next time?"

Golden nuggets started emerging. An engineer told me my "quick questions" in Slack were actually disruptive context-switches that broke deep work. Pings from the boss can be interpreted as critical, must-answer items. Noted.

Each insight tightened my OODA loop. I observed behavior, oriented to its impact, decided on adjustments, and acted. Then I observed the results and started again.

Late Career: The Compound Effect

By year twelve, I'd become religious about feedback loops. Not just giving, but receiving too. And I had to learn how to get good at hearing feedback because very few of us born eager to hear perceived criticism.

Someone starts to share an observation and immediately you hear: "That's not what I meant!" "You misunderstood!" The defensive walls shoot up before the feedback even lands.

I learned to catch myself in that moment. To literally bite my tongue and think: This person feels this way. Even if I disagree with their interpretation, that's real data. If I made someone feel confused, dismissed, or frustrated, my intent doesn't matter. The impact does.

"When you did X, its impact was Y." That simple framework—specific behavior, specific impact…changed everything.

The people who actively sought feedback advanced faster. It wasn't even close. While others spent energy defending their decisions, the feedback-seekers were already two iterations ahead.

When I left Apple to build Attrove, I knew one thing for certain: this discipline had to be in our DNA from day one.

The Practice: Attrove's Launch & The Vocal Minority

Launch Day Reality

October 10th, 2025. Launch day.

My team released Attrove to the public. My team sent gifs of rocket ships. My wife texted encouragement. My former colleague from Apple sent a thoughtful note about the product vision.

All wonderful. All appreciated. But you know what was better than warm wishes?

The complaints.

Within hours, messages started appearing. Not just on Product Hunt (though that had some good ones). In my inbox. In our support channels. From real humans trying to use the thing we built.

"The onboarding flow took longer than expected."
"Can this integrate with Zoom?"
"I hit an error during signup—here's a screenshot."

Research shows brands typically hear from less than 1% of their customer base.² That vocal minority punches way above its weight. And in those first 48 hours, I was reading every word like scripture.

What Early Users Taught Us

The praise felt good: "Looks like you're solving an important problem!" "The design is clean!" "Excited about this!"

But remember: that's opinion, not feedback. Useful for morale, but it doesn't tell us how to improve.

The gold was in the specific observations:

"Do you support WhatsApp yet? That’s my go-to chat platform." This told us we'd underestimated that use case. WhatsApp moved up the roadmap.

"Onboarding took 4-5 minutes when I expected less than 3 minutes." We instrumented the flow and found a few unnecessary steps. We synced too much data early on, now optimized. Onboarding now streamlined.

"I never got the signup email confirmation, but I really wanted to try it so I emailed you." We fixed the bug within a day of hearing this. But the real insight? Most users wouldn't have emailed. They'd have just left. That one piece of feedback probably saved dozens of conversions.

Each piece of information tightened our OODA loop. We shipped fixes within days—sometimes hours. Observe the friction, orient to the root cause, decide on a solution, act. Then watch for the next signal.

Building a Feedback Culture

Internally, our approach is simple: make feedback abundant and psychologically safe.

After shipping features: "What felt rushed? Where did we nail it?"
After customer conversations: "What surprised you? What patterns are you seeing?"

It's not about nitpicking or creating insecurity. The opposite. When people feel safe enough to say "I think we missed something" or "this approach isn't working," calculated risks become possible. Improvement becomes inevitable.

Externally, we've built multiple feedback channels: dedicated support email ([email protected]), forums, and personal outreach. Over the past weeks, I've contacted all of our roughly 200 early users directly. Not surveys. Actual conversations.

Will everyone be happy? Of course not. But here's the data point that matters: 83% of users stay loyal when their complaints are resolved.³ Not when they have no complaints, but when you resolve them. That means listening, acting, and closing the loop.

The Call to Action: Tighten Your Own Loop

If you're shipping something (a product, a proposal, a project), seeking feedback is on you. The good news? Most people will provide it when asked.⁴ They're just waiting for permission.

For founders and product people:
Don't wait for feedback to arrive. Hunt it down. After launches, after updates, after every meaningful milestone. Ask specific questions: "What friction did you hit?" "Where did you almost give up?" "What took longer than expected?"

For individual contributors:
Schedule feedback sessions with peers and managers. Not the annual review, but actual frequent conversations. Ask: "What's working in how I communicate?" "Where am I creating unnecessary friction?" "What's one thing I should do more of?"

For anyone who needs to give feedback:
Use this simple framework. First, ask permission: "Hey, can I share some feedback?" If they say yes, use this structure: "When you did X, its effect was Y." Be specific about the behavior and its impact. "When you interrupted during Katie’s demo, it shut down the conversation" is actionable. "Your communication style is aggressive" is not.

The mindset shift:
Feedback isn't about being right. It's about getting right, faster.

Everyone is flying blind with incomplete information. The difference between thriving and flailing isn't perfection…it's iteration speed. The faster you can spot problems, understand their impact, adjust, and test the change, the faster you compound your advantages.

Boyd understood this in aerial combat. Dalio understood it in financial markets. I learned it through 14 years at one of the world's most demanding companies.

And now, with Attrove just weeks old and learning every day, I'm living it in real-time.

Attrove's commitment: We'll keep our feedback loop tight, and we hope you'll help us do it. Reach out at [email protected] (seriously). Tell us what's working, what's broken, and what we're missing. We're listening. And ready to respond.

The question isn't whether you'll get feedback. It's whether you'll get it fast enough to matter.

Your time is too expensive to waste.

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1  https://www.principles.com/principles/f6412dca-b3f9-4dd0-bb65-274869dd21ed

2   https://www.alchemer.com/resources/blog/most-brands-hear-from-less-than-1-percent-customers/

3   https://maccelerator.la/en/blog/entrepreneurship/how-to-build-a-user-feedback-loop-for-startups/

4  https://www.alchemer.com/resources/blog/most-brands-hear-from-less-than-1-percent-customers/