What we learned on the way to 1 million users
Recently, Lucidpress hit the one million user mark, just over a year after launching our product, and we’ve continued to grow since then. To celebrate, I’d like to share 8 lessons for growing your small business to 1 million users.
Want more? Vicky has also written a follow-up to this post about getting to 2 million users and scaling growth.
1. Talk to your customers
After we had acquired a solid base of paying customers, I sent out emails offering them $10–15 Amazon gift cards if they would be willing to have a 30-minute phone interview. More than 50 customers accepted the offer, and I spent the next couple of weeks on back-to-back phone calls with our customers, asking them what their title was, where they worked, how they used Lucidpress, how they found Lucidpress, and so on. This process gave us the information we needed to create customer personas and kick off our customer development.
It’s easy to feel like there isn’t enough time or money for a large user research campaign, but I’d encourage you to make room in your budget. This entire kickoff only cost around $500, plus my time, and it’s already paid for itself many times over.
2. Ask new questions
Most business people are quick to ask demographic questions: age, gender, annual household income. But if you want to create effective growth strategies, you have to understand your customers’ values and opinions. Try asking these offbeat psychographic questions:
Who inspires you?
- What concerns keep you up at night?
- Where do you shop, play, and dine?
- When did you realize you needed our product?
- Why would you pay for a product like ours?
- How do you spend your free time?
To help us determine how to advertise to our customers, we also asked targeting questions:
- What are users searching for online when they come to our website?
- What magazines do they buy and what conferences do they attend?
- How do they feel when they use our product?
- What traits do our users have in common?
3. Use your customer’s own words
One of my top pieces of advice for small businesses is to invest in compelling messaging. That doesn’t mean you have to hire a professional copywriter or enlist the help of an ad agency. You can just as easily invest a few hours in chatting with your customers. Write down everything they say, then go panning for gold. You’re looking for words and phrases that jump at you. They might mirror what you’ve been saying all along, but in a way that better captures your intent. Or rather, that captures your customers’ intent, which is exactly the point of good messaging. With a little polishing, these phrases can become the centerpiece of your promotional content, including web pages, brochures, slideshows, and even elevator pitches.
4. Value your customers above yourself
Good marketing techniques aren’t about what works for you — it’s about what works for your customer. [Tweet this] For example, we interrupted our feature development to completely overhaul the company homepage. Why? Our users made it clear that the current site didn’t speak to their needs. Even though we were ranking for the relevant keywords, our homepage conversion rate wasn’t as high as we’d like. So we learned the 3 most important value propositions for our users and placed them prominently on the page. By considering what our customers were looking for and not just SEO, we increased registration rates by nearly 8%.
Old page
New page
5. Keep your ear to the ground
Lucidpress customers have the option of sending in feature requests if they have an idea that would improve the product. We’ve noticed that when someone makes a request, the thread quickly fills with other customers who want the same thing. For most businesses, a single customer comment represents at least a dozen others who haven’t spoken up yet. This makes each piece of feedback critical to your success.
I’ve also found that customers write to us in two circumstances: when they’re really happy and when they’re really upset. In both cases, you want to know why they’re feeling the way they are. I find it effective to stay in touch with customers on a daily basis by looking through our feature requests, support tickets, and Twitter feed. Doing this informs us when we need to make course corrections; it also lets us know what’s most exciting to our users.
6. Measure twice, cut once
One of our biggest missteps was devoting resources to a feature that we didn’t fully understand. We noticed a few people talking about analytics, so we spent a quarter and a half developing a feature that tracks analytics on published Lucidpress documents. It’s been 9 months since the release, and guess what? Very few people use it. We didn’t fully understand the the use case for analytics, so the end product wasn’t all that helpful. Moving forward, we’ll take the time to learn what customers are really asking for.
And remember — it’s good to recognize customer pain points, but don’t spread yourself too thin. This sounds intuitive, but it’s easy to overextend yourself, especially when you’re enthusiastic about growth. However, tackling too many issues at one will leave you with a frustrated team that’s being pulled in every direction. Plus, your product may end up being difficult to market, since it doesn’t solve the core problems customers are experiencing.
For example, we learned that our target audience didn’t really care about the fancy interactive features we developed for digital platforms. These small business owners were more concerned about working with local print shops and importing existing files. So we decided to hit pause on the flashy features and narrow in on our customer’s immediate needs.
7. Prioritize user testing
User testing may sound daunting to a small business, but it doesn’t have to be. We found that Lucidpress users have to be hooked on our product within five to ten minutes of first using it, or they’re unlikely to return. So we followed a cheap, simple formula, inspired by usability expert Steve Krug, who recommends testing as early and often as you can. Here’s our recipe for user testing success:
- We introduce customers to proposed features and ask them to explain what they’re seeing.
- We prompt them with questions like, “What’s happening on this screen?” and “What would you expect to happen if you clicked this button?”
- We record their responses and use the feedback to quickly iterate on planned features.
These short tests help us create intuitive user experiences throughout our products. And I can’t stress enough: it’s easy and affordable to do yourself.
8. Look for natural promotion opportunities
Since we just hit the 1 million user mark, we decided to run a promotion that offers 30% off annual accounts. We’ve found that customer lifetime value is higher with people who pay us annually, rather than monthly, and reaching 1 million users was a great opportunity to reach out to our users to encourage them to sign up for annual accounts. You should think about which holidays, current events, and times of year will be good opportunities to promote different features. If you’re there when someone needs you, then your product sells itself. Questions about the post? Tips of your own? Go ahead and put them in the comments below.
Check it out! Vicky wrote a follow-up to this post about getting to 2 million users and scaling growth.
About Vicky Thomas
Vicky Thomas is the Head of Product Strategy at Lucid Software, makers of top-ranked productivity apps Lucidchart and Lucidpress. Prior to joining Lucid, Vicky was a Product Manager at Adobe, where she was responsible for simplifying the Marketing Cloud implementation process. She is passionate about bringing new ideas to life with teams of exceptional people.
Originally published at www.lucidpress.com.
