Hello hello,
I hope you’re doing fine.
Today I’m going to talk about a very important topic if you want to achieve some kind of success with your venture: the customer feedback.
If you’re working or planning to work on a SaaS application or a mobile app, this piece is certainly a must read👇
Why you should rely on customer feedback to improve your value proposition
Gathering as much customer feedback as soon as possible is certainly another competitive advantage for any startup. 🚀
Based on this feedback, you should be able to rapidly adapt your product to better match your customer needs.
Once you find the perfect product for the perfect audience, you can say you’ve reached P/MF, Product/Market Fit.
Achieving P/MF should be the #1 major goal of any startup, even before finding a profitable business model. 🎯
Before that moment, any (large) paid marketing effort is a waste of time and money (you probably don’t have by the way).
So, putting the first version of your product (MVP) in front of your target audience as soon as possible should be an obsession.
Don’t misunderstand me. ⚠️
Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is not necessarily a fully coded and 100% functional application.
It can be a low fidelity prototype made out of wireframes.
Your MVP can also be as simple as a landing page that describes your value proposition.
Gathering customer feedback to improve your value proposition is the founding principle that you can find in Eric Ries’s best seller The Lean Startup (affiliation link).
He’s talking about implementing a Feedback Loop 👇
The idea is to proceed as follows:
Based on assumptions, you rapidly BUILD something that you can put in the hands of your target customers (by any mean).
You ask them for feedback and/or MEASURE their usage.
You analyze these data to LEARN what you need to change/adapt into your product.
You implement those changes and start the process all over again. Loop 🔁
This iterative process is something I implemented from day one at Flora Insurance.
Of course, this is not something you can do the same way at every step of your product development.
There is a BEFORE and an AFTER you have a live product available.
How to get customer feedback in the pre-product era of your startup
Do things that don’t scale
👆This is the title a famous essai written in 2013 by Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator.
For a lot of people in Start-up land, it’s like a motto. If you want to be an entrepreneur or launch a startup, you HAVE to do things that don’t scale.
In this situation, when you don’t have (yet) a live product, it’s more like… you cannot do things that scale. 🤪
In fact, you don’t have the choice.
Before you launch, the best thing you can do is to get out of the building (even virtually to remain covid-proof) and talk to people in your target audience.
Build that landing page I talked about earlier. Make sure to include a clear call-to-action allowing people to register to an email waiting list. ✉️
Now show it to people in your niche:
Share it in Facebook groups of people interested in the topic. Ask for feedback.
Show it to people IRL. Put it next to 2 of your competitors’s landing pages. Set the situation for them like: “You’re looking for this kind of product on Google and you found those 3 web pages. Browse them all and tell me the product you choose and why.”
Look for people with your ideal customer profile on Linkedin and send them a message. Ask for feedback.
…
Your objective should be to find the why behind their decision, the profond motivation that makes them choose a product over another.
Once you gathered enough qualitative data and adapted effectively your value proposition, it’s time for a more quantitative approach. 📊
Set up a Facebook or Google Ads campaign with a limited budget targeting your audience.
You’ll be able to generate some traffic to your page and see if people register or not to the waiting list or click a fake “Buy” or “Create Account” button.
If they don’t, you probably have to get back to work and pivot or adapt your value proposition.
Build a prototype of your app and do almost the same:
Find those people.
Ask them to achieve some goal in your app and let them do.
Don’t guide them. Observe. Ask for feedback.
If a majority of those test users blocks at particular step of your flow, you found an improvement.
There are tons of tools out there that let you easily build a prototype: Marvel, InVision, Adobe XD, Balsamiq and many others…
Another way to get feedback early on your product is to do like an increasing number of entrepreneurs do: build your startup in public.
The most famous examples are of course Buffer, the social sharing tool and Superhuman, the superfast email client app.
Here is an abstract of Milan Kordestani’s post on entrepreneur.com that well describes the benefits of this practice 👇
Building in public gives startups the ability to try out their ideas on consumers before officially launching new products. These users become an ever-growing audience of people “invested” and who want to ensure the product sees the light of day.
How to get customer feedback once you have a live product
Having launched the first version of your product, having it live and available for real users, doesn’t mean you can stop asking for feedback.
In fact, it’s quite the contrary.
Because your product is in the hands of people we chose to be your users. And if you want to grow your business, you need to keep them. And to retain them, you have to delight them with a great and continuously improving product.
The main difference is now that you can better measure the behavior of your users by doing things that have more ability to scale. 🥳
You can rely on more, better and less biased data to analyze and decide what changes or optimizations you need to implement to enhance your app.
Let’s go back in time. A little back in time, right before your go-live. 🔙
To make sure you can gather that highly qualitative feedback, you need to implement analytic tools to track what users do in your application.
What analytic tools should you implement?
Here’s a selection of the tools I use to track usage, and understand what people do in an app.
Google Analytics is totally free (in most cases) and very easy to implement in any website, web application or mobile application.
Because it’s based on page views, a simple implementation is unfortunately not sufficient to track user behaviors.
You’ll also need to tag you app to generate events in GA when users perform a certain action (click a button, create an item, download a document…). The easiest way to tag your application is to use Google Tag Manager, another free tool offered by the giant of Mountain View.
An alternative or complementary tool to track the behavior of users is Mixpanel.
Mixpanel also comes with a free version (limited to 100K monthly tracked users). Because the tracking is event-based by essence, it’s more powerful than GA, especially when you want to track usage in real time or practice A/B testing in mobile apps.
Once you know what people do in your app, you’ll need to understand why they do it.
Let’s imagine you want to analyze your web subscription flow, a sequence of screens people must go through to start using your product (create account, configure their subscription, add a payment mean, start using your app).
GA or Mixpanel will let you know where your users drop. People leave the process on screen 3.
A tool like Hotjar records user sessions that you can watch afterwards.
Hotjar will let you understand why people leave on screen 3 when you’ll watch recordings of people leaving the process there. In fact, people can’t select a date properly because your date picker is too complex.
Now you know what you can do to stop the bleeding. Fix the date picker problem.
If you want to learn more about behavior analytics tools, read this great post on Hotjar’s blog.
Important note: If you didn’t implement a minimum set of analytic tools, DON’T LAUNCH!!! ✋
That is a mistake I already made. The MVP was live. Things weren’t going well but the analytics was not set up yet. I lost almost a full month before I could understand that we needed to fix the date picker problem.
Don’t stop talking to people and asking them for feedback
It’s not because you implemented tracking tools that you’ll be able to understand every reason why your customers do things they do.
At Flora, we keep on calling every new person who started to subscribe for an insurance on our website but did not end the process.
We ask them how they found us, why they decided to subscribe to our home renter insurance and why they stopped.
It helped us understand that we needed to offer an additional payment mean to better match our customer needs, and finally improve our bottom line performances. 🤞
I hope you found this issue as valuable as I enjoyed putting it on paper.
If so, please comment, like or share it. 🚀
Kind regards,
Fabee