When No is as valuable as Yes

As you might noticed from my recent talk @ Founders Institute we are currently focused on growing viral coefficient. All of us know that word of mouth (when user recommends the app to his/her friends) is the best source to grow user base.

So as many developers do, we ask our user for recommendations — we display a special dialogue after a “significant event” (user gets the value proposition: in our case s/he is informed about gate change or flight delay) inviting him/her to recommend the app.

Some of them answer Yes, some — No, some would like to do it Later. We often consider “Yes” as positive outcome and “No” as negative one… But wait a minute — is it really negative? Okey, I admit it is negative right here and right now, but does not that mean your app is not that great so the user wants to recommend it? Isn’t this knowledge valuable in itself?

Well this is what our data scientist Nikita thinks and I totally agree with him. So we decided to ask some of those who answered “No” to share their feedback on the app and it generates a lot of insights how we could be better.

There was a great post on exit interviews as a retention technique, but I think we may be even more proactive — “No” to the recommendation question may be an indicator user is not happy!

What other early indicators you may propose? Let me know.