How to scale customer feedback as you go from 100 to 1000 active users

Notes from my personal experience

‘Know your customer’. It is one of the most repeated and revered phrases in the start-up ecosystem. But what does it really mean? What is it to ‘know someone’? Sure, you can know a lot about who they are, their characteristics, where they are from and what they eat. But really knowing someone is a lot more than that. It is about having an intimate understanding of their thoughts and feelings. It is being able to grasp where they are coming from, even when you completely disagree. Ultimately, it is about knowing what they are thinking before they do — that is what knowing someone really is. So, how do you develop this kind of relationship with your customer?

In the early days of your start-up it is best to have a personal relationship with all of your customers. You might be reluctant to do this because you are worried about putting the few customers you do have off by allowing them to see how small you are. Forget that. If they want your product they will be happy to give feedback on it.

At the start this process entails countless one on one interviews, email/messenger exchanges and lengthy phone calls. This is a time consuming process, but a completely necessary one.

However, as you go from 100 monthly active users to 1000 monthly active users this approach becomes harder to manage. Two challenges start to arise as you grow:

1. What do you do with all the qualitative feedback?

You may find that you have 100 user interviews, that each user has said something different and that there are few common themes.

I suggest you break down your customers into segments (e.g. age, location, interests). Once you have done this you should find that the feedback you receive within these segments is far more consistent. Then it becomes about choosing which feedback is the most relevant for your target demographic and giving more weight to those suggestions.

2. Time restraints

As you grow there is more and more work to do on every element of your business. Customer feedback is just one of many things you are dealing with in any given week and it can be easy to neglect.

It is really hard to continue the deep dive into individual customers’ thoughts and feelings. Therefore, you need to start being more efficient with how you collect the feedback.

I suggest you set up a private Facebook group for your early customers. It is really easy and companies like Tandem have had a lot of success with it.

Here is how to do it:

1. Set up a private group in Facebook
2. Give it an eye catching name and description i.e. ‘company name Hooligan squad’
3. Start adding some friendly faces to the group. Send them an example/model post template and ask them to post into the group for you (feel free to ask me for a model)
4. Start adding your real customers (make sure you ask their permission)
5. Sit back and watch the feedback fly in!

You can find my feedback group >>HERE<<

Using that feedback:

We’ve done the gather and analyse, but what about the act. The final stage of the process involves finding out which bits of your feedback actually make a difference to your product.

The best advice I can give is ignore your preconceptions and test the conclusions drawn from your customer research. I would recommend the following approach:

1. Identify your area of improvement
2. Create a hypothesis (from your feedback)
3. Deploy A/B test using Optimizely or Google Experiments
4. If the change improves the metric, roll it out.
5. Rinse and repeat

Hope this helps! If you have any further suggestions or alternative opinions please feel free to comment below.

Jack R

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