How do you effectively solicit feedback from your first 50 users?
Tyler Cote
4 replies
Any hacks people have found for getting quality feedback, and making the customer feel valued?
Any strategies to skip that have proven not to be very effective?
Replies
Joe Masson@socialtrade
I established close relationships with the beta users when I first started. They felt free to call out whatever it was they did or didn't like. Some founders make the mistake of acting like their product is perfect, and they just need to find the right customer. In reality it is the opposite. Finding your ideal customer and building your product around them will turn out much better than just slamming a product into peoples faces until it sells (i.e. adspend until you're bankrupt).
Many beta users had entirely free access, which was more than appropriate as we were finding out what they would want in a subscription service. Follow up with them repeatedly, the most important times to interact with the customer in my case were the initial onboarding, the 3 day marker, and the 7 day marker. These interactions enabled the user to first sign up and understand the basics of what they have, then evolve through different stages until they are fully comfortable and fully utilizing the service.
Share
In addition to asking first users, you could use our service. https://www.wewritereviews.co
I networked as extensively as I could via IRL events and online - e.g. Twitter, Discord, LinkedIn etc.
I scheduled as many zooms as I could.
Tried to see the situation from the users perspective.
Talked about the product and our solution and brought up the start-up project as naturally as possible.
That and I also created a note system using voice to log the conversation so later on I could review the user-interviews to learn and get better.
Give them 5-star treatment, be available for any questions they might have, offer personal demos, listen to their problems and iterate your product based on their feedback so they can see you are taking what they say seriously.