Customer Feedback is Oxygen
The customer might not always be right, but the customer is always worth listening to.
Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, attributes the success of the photo sharing application to one simple factor: listening to customer feedback.
Before Instagram, there was Burbn, a “check-in service” application. It was a slightly different version of Foursquare, but with the ability to upload and share photos live from a location. While working on Burbn, Systrom was relentless about talking to users and drawing feedback in order to understand the value and “best use” scenario for their customer base. The extensive qualitative and quantitative feedback analysis conducted by the Burbn team lead them to discover a curious pattern: most users of the application seemed to use it in order to share photos, rather than “check in” and share their location.
Armed with this information, Systrom “left the building” in order to grab real commentary from actual users in order to understand how the application can better serve as a photo sharing service. After numerous customer interviews and analysis, Systrom came to a conclusion that would become the basis to Instagram’s success and hyper growth:
People wanted to share photos quickly from their smartphone, but photos taken on mobile simply didn’t look beautiful.
Hence, the infamous photo filters were born. Keep in mind, at that time (2009), smartphone cameras took poor quality photos that rarely looked good. The “filters” solved this problem, and allowed users to share beautiful photos instantly from their mobile.
Eventually, Burbn became Instagram, which recorded 25 thousand users in its first day of release.
In retrospect, what Systrom and his team discovered might seem obvious. However, only with an incessant approach to soliciting and analyzing customer feedback could the Instagram/ Burbn team have realized how widespread the problem was. Customer comments also put the Instagram team on the right track to building a feature set that tackled actual problems faced by their users.
Customer feedback is oxygen. It breathes life into a dying startup, and can help the startup ignite into a fire of hyper growth.
Slice of Advice
In order to build something that people want and use, you have to listen to those people. Don’t lock yourself in the office and assume you have an intuitive understanding of who your customers are and what they want. Leave the building, and listen carefully to comments from real users. It’s the only way you’ll build something worth anything to anyone.
