Could you provide an overview of New Grain and your background?

It started with me in lockdown. I’m passionate about film photography and I got even more passionate when I was stuck in my home during lockdown and I started to shoot films and experiment with it but I wanted to have an app where I could learn more about film and expand my skills. I’m not a coder so I didn't know how to do that but I used a no-code tool called Glide and I built a small app that categorizes every film stock that you can buy to shoot film. Then I slowly posted it on Reddit and got some attention, some new users joined, and more and more people were interested about this app becoming something more, not just a place for information but also a place to share your photos. That’s where the new vision of creating a digital space dedicated for film photographers where you can not only learn a lot about film, film stocks, cameras, etc. but also share your work. You can connect with other photographers in your area or across the world. 

I’m still in university, but I took a gap year to focus on the project and in the meantime, I met Arish who joined the adventure as the CTO and we’ve released the app on iOS two months ago, that’s when we realized that we needed a way to organize feedback from our users much more efficiently and we bumped into Nolt, so we decided to give it a go and we loved it. 

What challenges did you have and what led you to look for a solution like Nolt?

For building a great product, customer feedback is the best place to answer all your questions about the product about what the customers want from the app, let’s say someone wants a navigation feature or anything about the UX or a new feature. We wanted to really get close to our customers and we actually tried a lot of alternatives to get feedback from it. We even tried implementing in-app feedback, we connected it with our back end and it gave us the data about it but it wasn’t really UX friendly for having a public board out there, like Nolt has. Honestly, when we started using Nolt we didn’t understand why there are other alternatives because it’s such a good product, not only we like using it but our users love giving feedback on it. So it’s a win-win for both of us. 

We were doing it like really bare bones. People were giving us feedback through Instagram DMs and like Arish said, the first version of the app had an in-app feature to give feedback but the real problem was that we kept receiving the same feedback over and over again. The difference with Nolt board is that people can upvote so that’s great because first of all it gamifies the whole thing and people get involved and engaged. It is also great for us because then we don’t have 5 different tickets or duplicates of the same piece of feedback sp that’s what we loved more about Nolt when we started using it.

How do you guys use Nolt at your company? What does the workflow look like?

We have a New Grain-Nolt subdomain and we share the link on Instagram, to our users. We also have the link embedded in our app so users can go from there and they give us feedback from there. It’s really simple and clean. People love it this way. How it goes is, I check the Nolt board every day and I try to respond to every single comment and new post. Sometimes I merge 2 things together because it’s the same suggestion and then from that we try to do 1 update a week or even 2 sometimes. 

We use linear as our project management too and it would be pretty cool if we could integrate Nolt into Linear so we can take those feature requests and put it in Linear by linking it somehow so we can have a workflow, like we do with GitHub. We have each branch with a feature request and a ticket so if we can integrate and automate it, that would definitely be really good to track it. How we do it now is we some tickets with Nolt link, so new grain.nolt.io/66, for example, it shows a preview but if we could fully integrate it and let’s say we finished the ticket then it could say all things done on Nolt because you has a tracking system on Nolt where you can show your progress

How did you find the setup process for Nolt?

I think the setup was really straightforward if i can remember. I found Nolt through Glass, the photography platform. I thought it looked really clean and wanted something similar for New Grain as well. I barely remember, so I think it’s a good sign, if I don't remember it’s because I didn't struggle to do it. I saw that there was a 10-day trail and we actually set up the Nolt board on the day that we launched the app and we were getting so many requests through Reddit because we launched on Reddit so it was an urgent necessity to have this board so I set it up and I think 5 minutes in and it was already up and running and I started sharing the link immediately to people on Reddit to give the feedback. So yeah, I think the setup was pretty simple. 

What do you think the main benefits are of using a platform like Nolt? How does it help you guys?

We really rely on customer feedback to build a product, especially for New Grain because we’re a community platform dedicated to the film stock community so it’s really crucial for us to  build with the community. That’s how we gain their trust because the film community is quite a gated community sometimes, you have to prove that you are trustworthy and for us, we’re super transparent. We run all our communication through Instagram and it's important to gain their trust in us. We want to show that we can build with them and have the Nolt board where they can directly suggest their ideas and we communicate what we’re planning to do. 

The other thing is community relies on community. It sounds redundant but what I mean is that when our community members see other community members using the public board to give feedback on something, they want to give feedback and they just upvote it. This proves that people are loving our product.

If you guys had to describe Nolt in one sentence, what would it be?

"The only public feedback board you’ll ever need."