How to get people to talk about your product

The most effective growth hack is a good ol’ personal recommendation. We all know that, and if you run a business in the digital space you know that even better. Want to win over a new customer for your product or service? Make sure an existing user recommends it to his friends and followers. Amazing, right? All you have to do is ship dopeness, lean back, and wait for the snowball to start rolling.

Well, it’s not that easy. Obviously, having a great product helps. It helps tremendously. Vice versa, if what you’re selling is useless, not an awful lot of people who don’t share your last name will want to get behind it.

But still, there are a few things you can do to boost recommendations.

To begin with, building an opinionated product helps.

We learned that when we launched Deckset, our presentation app for the Mac. Deckset goes against many trends in digital product development. It’s not on the web. What you see is not what you get. It doesn’t allow for a huge degree of personalisation. But all of this is intentional. We wanted to create a fast, clean, robust experience with a focus on an efficient process and excellent results. We wanted to make a point — a point which seems to have resonated with many people, to a degree that they wanted to talk about Deckset on Twitter or recommended it to a PowerPoint-plagued friend.

In a way, using Deckset is taking sides. And you sure are more likely to speak up for your side than for a product that is “just great”.

Another excellent way to get more people to talk about what you sell is to collaborate.

Collaboration is awesome in many ways. You gain a fresh perspective and an extra set of skills. You foster and extend your network. It’s heaps of fun. And, as a welcome side effect, you give more people a compelling reason to talk about your venture.

Deckset was a great learning opportunity here as well. We wanted to include a couple of themes with a lot of personality, so we reached out to some of our favourite type designers and asked them whether they’d be interested in contributing. We obviously didn’t do this for the promotional benefit. We wanted to invest in what would make Deckset more attractive to our customers. Plus, we’re all type nerds, and why would you pass on a chance to work with people you admire?

In the end we were able to license typefaces from Jakob Runge, Göran Söderström and Mike Rohde. They all helped make the app better. But they also helped promote the app. Thanks for both of that. :-)

One more thing. This one might sound incredibly stupid. But we’ve found it’s anything but stupid. The thing is: Just ask.

We also run a service called Scenery, which helps designers make great-looking device mockups. There are a lot of automated emails sent by the system — sign-up confirmations, invoices, all that stuff — and to all these emails we added one sentence:

If you’re enjoying the app it would mean so much if you shared the love by telling your friends about Scenery.

Turns out this works. Ask kindly and people will help you (given you have a product people feel is worth recommending, of course).

We spent quite a lot of time thinking hard about how to create a referral scheme for Scenery. We probably should have implemented something. But in the end, we didn’t have the time nor did we have enough confidence that we’d win an amount of new customers that would justify the development costs. So we did this one little thing, and it totally worked. We constantly see people tweeting right after they received the automatic message.

Kind of amazing if you think about it. People rock ❤!

Learn more about what we do over at acolorbright.com or follow us on Twitter.