Customers aren't active post launch
Solomon Bush
7 replies
Have some customers after launching, but none of them are actively using my SaaS platform. Any advice? Should I email them, and try to get feedback. Or just chalk it up to a loss and keep trying to get new customers without changing my app.
Replies
Sarah Bond@sarahbondksu
Completely agree with David and Abderisak about getting feedback directly from your customers. You'll learn so much from talking with them on a Zoom or Google Meet.
If you're not at a point where you can get a customer to speak to you live, a tool like Lucky Orange (disclaimer - I work there!) that lets you see a playback of what people are actually doing while they're on your platform. Maybe they're hitting a technical issue you're not aware of that's keeping them from using the app (test this for different browser and device types). Watch for things like rage clicks (repeated clicks on the same thing) to find parts of the platform that might be confusing or frustrating to users.
A heatmap can show you of the parts of the platform that are getting engagement (clicks/taps) and can be really insightful. We use these insights to figure out what parts of our app are most popular with customers and which areas aren't getting as much attention and would be a good place to dig deeper.
Also, have your UX, development and marketing teams work with you on this type of analysis. It's way more powerful when you have multiple people looking into these challenges and figuring out design, development and messaging/positioning fixes you can test out.
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@sarahbondksu This is a great idea! I haven't looked into Lucky Orange but I will definitely have to check it out! That's a good point about the technical issue, I never really considered that before, or the 'rage clicks' part.
So it's currently just me right now. I do all the development, marketing, and UX lol. But that's definitely a great piece of advice to pocket for when I start building a team. It's always good to approach a problem from multiple angles!
Thanks!
- Solomon
@solomon_bush You've got a lot on your shoulders as a one-person team! Good luck with the optimization efforts. Once you can see first-hand what people are doing, you should get some good ideas for improvement. Keep testing and iterating until you find what sticks.
Hi Solomon,
you should definitely get some feedback from your users!
Try to contact them directly instead of sending out survey emails.
Another thing that might help you understand your users: Hotjar or something similar.
Record their behavior on your application and watch the recordings. Maybe you will find something that causes the churn.
This should be a constant process. Watching user activity, getting feedback, and doing adjustments to your app.
If the amount of initial users is low, you might also have been just unlucky with the first ones.
The last thing that comes to my mind: Maybe you marketed your app to the wrong kind of users. This also happens quite often.
Cheers,
David
@david_gregorian Thanks for the feedback! This is a great idea. I will reach out directly to them and see if I can get some feedback - Also, I will have to checkout Hotjar. That sounds pretty cool.
No, don't keep trying to get new users until you've figured out what's wrong with the current version. We had the same issue when we released our first version of Avidnote, but we asked our users for feedback, and we immediately fixed the issue that they reported and then the retention figures increased!
What analytics software do you use to analyze behavior? Have you tried something like Inspectlet or similar that will show you exactly how your users use your app. If you can get a phone call with one of them, that's even better.
@avidnote This is a great point. At first, when I launched, I realized that after creating an account my users navigated around the app, looked at blank dashboards and tables and then left. Log Harvestor is a log aggregation tool like Data Dog or Elastic, but if there is no data in there, it looks boring. So I figured that I would create a test/demo account that had real logs being processed. That way they could play with the dashboards and tables and live streams. But this was after I launched, and I stopped getting new users by the time I released this feature. Lol
As far as analytics software goes, I was using Google Analytics, however, even with all it's features I didn't like how it was structuring the data. So I built my own analytic software using websockets, so I can see in real time page views, clicks, and events, without getting killed by ad-blockers.
But I will checkout Inspectlet and I will try reaching out to my current users and see if I can do a 1-on-1 with them to get feedback! Great idea!
Thanks for the feedback and congrats on Avidnote! It's awesome to hear that retention increased!
- Solomon