Your product is lost in the clutter — hiring more devs will not solve this

If you ever skimmed through a message board, you may have noticed a user posting the same question several other people already posted.

Or, looking in the Comments section of a website, you may see comments claiming to disagree with the author only to have their argument agree with what was actually written.

Or, as a SaaS startup, you may find that people try to summarize your product in very interesting ways to the point where their summary doesn’t match what your product actually does at all.

It’s easy to assume people are lazy. Too lazy to read other posts to see if anybody else had the same question. Too lazy to read the full article to realize they actually agreed with the author. Too lazy to spend some time to learn that your photo editing site is nothing at all like Facebook. The truth is, everybody is guilty of doing this (yes even you and me) and the problem is not an epidemic of laziness.

The problem is that there is so much information coming at us all the time that we do not have the ability to give anything our full attention.

It is believed that up until around 1905 it was possible for a well-educated person to have a grasp of all fields and disciplines. In 1910, the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica was, as Hans Koning from the New Yorker pointed out, the last edition where they believed they had the entirety of all human knowledge (of the time) in one body of work. Today, you would be lucky to have a solid grasp of a specialized subset of a single industry in one body of work.

With 1 zettabyte of info at your fingertips, little wonder we’ve got attention deficits

Before the Information Age, which began around 1975, the next most portable format for relaying a decent amount of information would be a book. According to this blog post in 2010, there were 129,864,880 books in the world at that time. Some estimates of how much data those books would take up if their characters were on a hard drive instead of the printed page has it sitting around 52 terabytes.

Before the Information Age, most of these books would have been inaccessible to the majority of people due to the cost of replicating them and the logistics of transportation and storage.

Today, you could store all of those books on 6 hard drives for around $3,000 (even cheaper if you are price shopping or willing to have more hard drives). You could easily carry that around with you in a single backpack.

It is tough to estimate how much data could be stored across the Internet with servers being constantly added and disk space getting cheaper all the time. There are many estimates out there and it is probably safe to say that we are over the 1 zettabyte range (which is 1 billion terabytes). Even if most of this storage is not accessible to everybody (and if we were to eliminate any duplicated information) there is still more data available to us each and every day than we could read in a lifetime. And all of this is stored in a format that costs next to nothing to duplicate and is accessible from a device you can fit in your pocket

With all this data available to us and coming at us all the time, no matter where you go or what you are doing, you are not too far away from it. We have what is known as information overload. We are inundated with information all the time and we simply cannot keep up with it. In an attempt to keep up with it, we sometimes give our screens more time than we do our loved ones. We visit sites like Reddit and Facebook to get a distilled version of the data that is out there. To compensate for our inability to process all of this information, we skim articles to get the gist of it and we move on. We skip long articles or just read the headlines and take those away as the learning (which happens more often than we like to admit). We assume we know what we are being told and we leave with our own narrative as to the meaning of what we were reading.

So, how do you explain things to a world conditioned to skip, skim or make assumptions for anything longer than a simple sentence (and you would be lucky to get them to read even that)?

There’s no such thing as “Our product sells itself”

Developers have a mindset that if you build it they come. The belief is that as soon as you release your app to the world, the world will come pounding at your door. This simply is not true and if this is your plan, you probably won’t do very well.

As a developer, it is very hard to admit this. “What do you mean my awesome product will not sell itself!? Surely I do not need to convince people that my awesome product is awesome!”

Unfortunately, the market is full of “awesome” products that people just need to discover. It doesn’t matter how good your app is — if it can’t get past all the other information flooding your potential users, it will go nowhere. Those people daring to visit your website or blog are already overloaded with information from many different sources. Your marketing site, your documentation and your support materials will just be some of the many sources of information they are looking for a reason to filter out. Even the concept of your app! People will try to simplify and draw comparisons between your app and what they already know so they can move on.

If you have heard of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development in children, he says it’s easier for children to assimilate new information (fitting a new idea into an existing concept or view of the world) than to accommodate new information (changing how someone views a concept instead of trying to fit it into an existing one). Although Piaget’s work was primarily with children, this sounds pretty familiar as it relates to information overload in our world, doesn’t it?

So what do you need to do when marketing your SaaS?

Your website won’t “sell” your product — this will

To help your potential users find out that your awesome product is actually awesome, your product will need help. I’ve read dozens of books on startup growth. I’ve spent hundreds of hours talking to other startup founders. I’ve madly typed notes (in Airstory) while attending talks about startups that have grown into multi million and billion dollar businesses. And without question, time and again, what I hear is not that you should hire more programmers to build out more features to grow your startup. No, what I hear repeatedly is this: the turning point for most of the world’s most successful companies was when they hire a sales team. Some people have gone so far as to say that you cannot hire soon enough or too many sales people. One presenter (who is working on his second billion dollar business) wanted to make sure this simple concept was understood. He said:

“If your business is doing very well and you do not believe you need a sales team, then chances are you are the sales team! You just haven’t realized it yet.”

So now, you may be asking, “Isn’t sales just another source of information overloading our customers?” And the answer is, it could be. But the job of the sales person isn’t to help solve the information overload problem. They are not even there to help distill information for end users.

The sales person is there to create a connection with a potential user.

When a connection is established between a potential user and a sales person, the user will be willing to invest a little more time in your product. The user will actually read your great marketing materials. The user may take the time to get into your documentation. The user could even give your app more than a few minutes of their time and may actually discover what it is you can really help them do.

All this because a sales person focused on making a connection. (There are some great tips on how to make a connection with potential users in this excellent blog post.)

Just as your product won’t sell itself, it won’t support itself either

So, the user has made a connection with your sales person, and now that user has an account underway. What happens now? If you just let the user wander around your app aimlessly, s/he could get confused or stuck and you will lose her/him.

What you need is an awesome customer success system.

This is a system of technologies and, more importantly, great people who will help users through those early days of using your product. Users are still at the stage where they are unsure if they are willing to allow your information to reach them and it won’t take much to lose them.

Having somebody available to support users through the earliest stages of engaging with your app is another connection customers can make with the company. Even if what they are discovering isn’t exactly what they wanted, there is a great chance they will give you even more of their time if they made another connection.

Imagine if users made a connection with your both your product and your company. That’s how you become Nike, Starbucks, Patagonia…

At Airstory, we found that users who leave us are usually those who only signed in once. Most of these users come and go in less than an hour. We have found that those who come back and give us more than that first day to learn what Airstory can do for them rarely drop off after that. Because of this, we take customer success very seriously.

Five months into Airstory, we have the following in place so far for customer success:

• Intercom for in-app support messaging
• UserLane for user onboarding
• Custom in-app “in case you missed it” screens
• 1 full-time head of customer success
• 3 part-time customer success reps

That, and our head of operations jumps in to help out with success when it’s busy, like it was during our AppSumo promotion. All in, more than a third of our monthly costs go toward customer success.

To our core, we believe Airstory can help professional writers with tight deadlines achieve what they need to do in substantially less time. We want to make sure the bad habits people have formed to battle information overload (making assumptions, skimming and looking for reasons to bail) isn’t preventing them from discovering our great product.

You cannot grow without investing in creating strong human connections

Customers will not give you the time of day to have a meaningful product experience if they don’t have a connection with you, your company or your product first.

Many people feel that adding more developers should be the primary focus of a SaaS startup. But it’s not. Listening to those who have been through this before, filling the sales and support roles should happen earlier than you probably think. And definitely before you hire too many developers to build all the awesome features your target customers will never experience if they don’t build a connection with you first.

So, before you invest all your time and money into building that awesome product and growing a development team, make sure you have the support the customer needs to be successful and a great sales strategy, where you connect with your users on a personal level. How well you do this will have a greater impact on how well your startup does than how great your product is. (Of course, a great product makes all of the work of building connections more likely to succeed.)