
Talking to users - Plugawy
http://www.defstartup.org/2016/11/23/talking-to-users.html
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gk1
Here's an easy way to start a conversation with new trial users:

Send a simple, one-line email that asks them what they hope to achieve with
your product/service.

"Hi, saw you signed up for Acme, welcome! What are you hoping to get out of
your trial?"

(I've written about this before: [http://www.gkogan.co/blog/question-for-saas-
trial-users/](http://www.gkogan.co/blog/question-for-saas-trial-users/))

~~~
Mahn
Personally, both as a consumer and as founder, I feel like intros like these
come across as a bit aggressive, like I can almost read into the email that
you want to sell me something. I prefer an intro of the lines of "Hey, glad to
see you on board, I'm the founder of $company, let me know if you have any
questions or if you just wanna chat, I'm around". Not that I have the data to
know which works better, but to me it makes more sense that the intro is about
just talking about the product rather than how can we get you to buy from us
best.

~~~
aninhumer
I feel like I'd probably parse that message as non-information, since I know I
can send them an email if I want to (but I probably won't).

What has led me to submit feedback most often is having a fairly prominent
"send feedback" button somewhere on every page. It means as soon as I notice a
problem or think of a useful feature, I'm immediately able to press a button
and write even just a one sentence suggestion.

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Kinnard
I'm inclined to disagree with the author's thesis. I agree that talking to
users is essential, but I think his heurstic is arbitrary: "You’re doing it
right if you can get a third of potential users to pay you money within a
month of initial contact."

The real number you should be targeting is the number of users you need to pay
in order to build a sustainable business, that could be above 80%, it could be
below 5%, it could be 0 . . .

This is something that varies widely by business and I don't think it's good
advice for a company that falls outside the scope I imagine the author is
thinking of.

~~~
cglee
The premise is that you should aim for a higher conversion number because it
forces you to focus on a more narrow audience segment. I think that's really
sound advice, and might go as far as to say that's the key to building any
business. Typically any business can find 1 person who loves their product,
but then extrapolate incorrectly or slice the wrong segment to focus on.
Higher conversion number means you've started to focus on the right segment.

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chuckus
From my experience, I disagree with the heuristic of money paid within the
first month for knowing if you are really talking to users, because it doesn't
apply especially for enterprise SaaS, where you likely to have a direct sales
model, and as a co-founder with no sales experience at the beginning, as you
continue to sell subscriptions, let's say the same functionality within a
product, you will improve as a salesperson, closing deals earlier and by that
heuristic, you know what your customers want.

Consistent user engagement with the product is a better metric to build such a
heuristic, because user engagement is direct correlated to value IMO. That's
why I am a fan of even charging $1 per month for a product, because it easier
(relative to having given it away for free) to increase pricing based on the
value you deliver to your customer, which can be measured through user
engagement with the product.

~~~
coffeemug
_> user engagement is direct correlated to value IMO_

It is not. At RethinkDB we had great user engagement, but people were
unwilling to pay (or unwilling to pay enough to keep the business going). The
heuristic of getting money in early avoids markets with bad fundamentals
(developer tools is one instance of such markets).

~~~
yoshyosh
Building a DB is a large endeavor, it's hard to see being able to get people
to buy within only a month of contact for it (without playing with it and
such). If you were to start from scratch again with RethinkDB, do you feel
this logic still applies?

~~~
coffeemug
I would build it as a PaaS business (e.g. see Firebase), although that's a bad
business for other reasons (impossible to effectively compete with Google
Cloud and AWS).

~~~
nine_k
Why not rent out access to AWS / GC instances running your software?

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tchock23
This post makes no sense to me. The goal of talking to users is not to sell
them something. The goal is to better understand their needs/attitudes/pain
points/etc. so that you can improve your products and services.

That eventually leads to product/market fit (and therefore revenue), but
putting a conversion goal on user research sounds more like a sales activity
than true user research to me...

Did I just miss the point of the post?

~~~
neil_s
Yes, you kinda did. User research is very hard to believe when users aren't
putting their money where their mouth is. It doesn't even matter if you take
users to a credit card form and then throw away their card details. The fact
that they were willing to take their credit card out for you means they
actually, genuinely care about this pain point, in a non-theoretical way.

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nxc18
I'm not sure about the magic number here, but as a user, I do know that I
appreciate hearing from the company.

Years ago I signed up for Todoist and I was so impressed by the emails and
communication that I got (on top of it being a fantastic product) that I
subscribed to premium and have been ever since.

~~~
douche
I'll be honest, I really don't appreciate it. I've become very leery of giving
out real information when I have to before downloading some trial product[1],
because if I put real email addresses and phone numbers, I start getting
hounded by sales reps. It's not worth wasting their time or mine.

[1] typical case is, some customer of ours has a weird piece of third-party
enterprise software that is flubbing up one of our products. Anti-virus and
web proxies tend to be particularly over-aggressive, both with dorking up
other software, and with the sales reps.

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smaddali
Overall I agree with the spirit of the article but 30% could be too high based
on the vertical you are in. Collecting feedback when you dont have direct
connection to your users ( like you don't have email address ) is hard.
Progressively engaging with users and asking/helping them what they want to
accomplish will yield lot of insights.

