Don’t just talk to your users. Befriend them!
The last few months I’ve worked a lot on getting people to create content on Scrimba, the interactive coding screencast tool that Magnus, Sindre and I are building. Getting content creators activated is critical, as we won’t get a proper feedback loop going unless people actually use our product (duh!).
And while we haven’t solved this problem 100% yet, we figured out how to get the ball rolling.
The answer turned out to be found in one of the most common startup advice given: talking to your users. However, talking to them wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough for us at least. And I suspect it to be the case for many other products as well.
In order to get proper results we had to befriend our users.
You see, we had been talking to our users all along. From the beginning of, we felt did everything we could to get in touch with them:
- we started a Gitter chat room
- did tons of manual reach out via email & social media
- started a Facebook group
- opened a public community repo on GitHub
But nothing seemed to work well enough. We couldn’t get a conversation going. We talked to them, not with them. This meant we could rarely get the same people to give feedback more than once.
Changing the strategy
So one Friday during a brainstorming session with one of our investors — Kjetil Holmefjord — he said:
Try to get your users onto a 20 minutes call on Skype so that you can really understand what stops them from creating content. Most people will likely say no, but that’s ok. It certainly won’t scale, but that’s ok too.
By Monday I had my first Skype chat. A couple more the following days. Half way through the week we started seeing results: people got involved in the chat room, filed issues on our GitHub repo, some even started creating content. The quality of our feedback increased drastically.
The fact that this approach doesn’t scale is part of the point. I’m suspecting the reasons our previous techniques didn’t work was simply because they were too scalable.
This is why I think the common advice talk to your users should be changed to befriend your users.
Talking can be done at scale, but befriending can’t.
No big company can befriend all their users, but an early stage startup can. That’s the one advantage we have over big companies.
So what does it mean to befriend someone? I don’t have a definition. But it starts with talking with them in person or through a video call, not through email. And the dialogue should continue to a point where it will feel natural for you to meet them for a coffee or beer next time you’re in the same city.
This is the case for many Scrimba users now.
If you want to become one of our friends, send me an email at per@scrimba.com, and we’ll setup a Skype chat.
Thanks for reading! I’m Per, co-founder of Scrimba — interactive coding screencasts created in an instant. Be sure to check it out!
