The challenges of managing user feedback at an early stage SaaS startup
In my last post (lessons from our 1st year as a bootstrapped startup) I discussed how product prioritization has been one of our biggest challenges, especially for me (a founder with a sales background). Another reason this has been a challenge for us is that Kyle and I didn’t have extensive experience in ad tech, the industry we serve. We’ve built and sold products for publishers and ad tech folks, but neither of us has ever worked in the roles we’re building product for. We rely heavily on customer feedback for product enhancements and features. Here’s what we’ve found: not all customer feedback is equal, and feedback in a vacuum can cause big problems for you.
Not all customer feedback is equal
In our first year bootstrapping Ad Reform, we’ve had the typical types of contacts: leads that have never used any of our tools, users of our free tool, users who try our free trial, and users who pay. We’ve received feedback from all four of these groups. Here’s how we rank the value of the input from these groups (most valuable to least):
- Paid users: They’ve invested time and money in your product. Delight them and dig for opportunities to provide them more value.
- Trial users: If they don’t convert, their feedback can be pretty valuable. Find out what’s holding them back.
- Free tool users: They’ve invested some time, so there’s some value here. Figure out why they haven’t started a trial.
- Leads that have never used your product: Don’t do it!
Early on, you’re looking for anyone to give you feedback and you may not have many users yet. This is where you have to be super careful, because you will get feedback from people, but if they aren’t investing time with your product it can be a red herring.
Before we started Ad Reform, we scored 18 meetings in NYC with different companies we wanted to pitch our idea to and get feedback from(we didn’t have an MVP yet). One thing I’d always heard from other startup folks is that you should ask potential customers what they’re willing to pay for this theoretical product. We did that, but the feedback was worthless. Here’s why:
- The product doesn’t exist and they have nothing to base their feedback on
- There’s no risk! They could say they would pay $1 or $100k, but it means nothing because they don’t actually have to pay it. Getting someone to say yes is a lot different than getting someone to add their credit card info
Getting someone to say yes is a lot different than getting someone to add their credit card info
Feedback carries much more weight when someone invests time using your product and you try to get them to actually pay for it. Jason Fried of Basecamp loves to talk about this point:
If they’ll pay you upfront to build out your idea (and keep the IP), then that’s a different story. Those opportunities are rare, and you should consider that if you believe the product is broad enough to cover other companies use cases.
Focus on feedback from users that invest time in your product, with a much heavier emphasis on users who invest time and money.
Feedback in a vacuum
Gathering feedback from users is a must in your search for product-market fit, but simply getting any feedback isn’t enough. It’s important to understand how many users have similar types of feedback and why they they have that request (i.e. what job will this feature do for them and why do they need this done?)
We’ve learned this the hard way at times, building features for one high paying customer, then later finding out not many other users cared. Or building based on what the user said they wanted, without digging into why they wanted it or what goals they were trying to achieve with the new feature. My friend Melanie hits on this in her post on roadmaps:
The new feature becomes too narrow, only benefiting the one specific customer who was willing to invest in it.
Melanie, Kyle, and I ran into this building product at Rigor back in the day. Mostly the sales guy’s fault 😉
At Ad Reform, we’ve taken a few steps to improve this process to make sure we’re not gathering feedback in a vacuum:
- Gather feedback in Intercom
We ❤️ Intercom. Most people think Intercom is a tool for engaging with your users, and it’s certainly great for that. But Intercom is so much more. It’s a hub for all user data: conversations, product usage, revenue, etc. (another blog for another day). Most of our customer conversations happen in Intercom, and the majority of feedback starts there (Do you really want feedback from people that aren’t using your product anyway?).
Intercom offers a simple way to tag conversations, and we use this feature to tag feature requests. This way, we can quickly see the feature requests from our users (and companies) in the context of a conversation, understand our most requested features, and ultimately communicate back to our users (via Intercom, of course) when we have updates on their requests.
2. Build our own product 🛠
When we started Ad Reform we kicked things off by coming up with our core values. No, not stuff that we put on posters around the office or hashtag in every Instagram post. Simply values that lay a foundation for how we want to run our business. One of those is to explore, create, and have fun. We wanted to make sure we spent 80% of our time on the core of our product, but reserve 20% of our time to explore new ideas or build helpful internal tools. We even have a pitch list in Trello, where we save ideas we have for a later day. Userfeed was one of them, and it had the benefit of being something we really needed.
We wanted a simple way to connect feedback to customer data (Intercom platform), close the loop on product updates (Intercom messages), & communicate about feature requests with users (an embeddable place to submit feedback, vote, comment, and view the roadmap). We built everything on top of Intercom to help us manage feedback internally, and give our most engaged users a better experience. We figured other teams might find value in this as well, so we’re releasing a commercial version shortly. If you’re an intercom user, feel free to sign up for early access (in progress landing page ⚠️).
As you start and grow your own SaaS businesses, one of the most important things to get right is how you manage user feedback. People who submit feature requests and feedback are your most engaged users. Make sure you treat them right!
