How to get users for your software product in 2020
A 3 step process that can help you get relevant users.
In the last 10 years, it has become easier and easier to build a mobile app or a web platform. If between 2000 and 2010 technology was one of the most important differentiators when it came to building your startup product, things started changing in the last decade. As coding became easier and more accessible to people all over the world, the differentiator that used to be technology, shifted more and more to things like “value proposition” and “marketing and sales”.
In 2020 most technologies that are not in the “deep tech” niche, can be considered commoditized because you can easily find a freelancer or a software development agency that can build your mobile app or your web platform.
Even with all these options, it’s still not easy to pick the best partner. But as we have seen in quite a few examples, picking the right development partner for your product is really really important, because this partner can (and should) help you get the best version of your product on the market.
This article is about another important part, besides just building your product: getting people to use your product after launch.
While working with different startups in the last 6 years, either as a development partner through our product agency, Zipper Studios, as part of the founding team or as advisors for startups, we saw that this is one of the most critical moments in time, for an early-stage startup: getting users after launching their product.
This is not an easy thing to do, so I will do my best to present a process that can be structured in 3 simple (but not easy) steps, that need to be thoroughly worked on before the launch phase. These steps are:
- Customer segmentation: understand who are the people that will be using your product, and learn more about them;
- Product features & user experience: making sure that you implement the “must-have” features and that you implement them in a simple and effective way;
- PR & Communication: if you understand who your users are and how your product can help them, then you have to know how to communicate that, in the early stages;
First, you have to understand that you are not building this product just for you so the way that you believe this problem should be solved is just an assumption until this is validated by other people in the market. This seems like an obvious thing but a lot of people start out by believing that this assumption is true and make mistakes along the way due to this fact.
With this in mind, let’s go into more detail with our process.
1. Customer segmentation
It’s important to understand the fact that it’s almost impossible to build a product that will be a good fit for everybody, in the early stages. People in different segments have different expectations of the software products that they use, so you need to find the customers that you can learn the most about and that you believe can get the best use out of your product, in the beginning.
We can take a look at a lot of well-known companies like Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, Snapchat, Tik Tok, in the B2C sector, which started out mostly by offering their product only to young people between 14–24 years old. Even if customer segmentation was not done in an intentional way, they had a clear view of who were the users that they were targeting, so they built the user experience and the communication plan in a way that would give them the highest chances of getting users from this segment.
Facebook targeted people in college that were interested in connecting with other college students. Instagram focused its mobile app on young people that were interested in photography and wanted to have better experiences when taking photos on their phones and sharing them with the world. Tinder also focused its mobile app on young people in college that wanted to find other students that they can hook up with.
Keeping these examples in mind, make sure that in this first step you create a simple process for identifying your customer segment and create a user persona. This will help you in the next steps.
2. Product features & user experience
The most important parts of the product that you are building are its features and the user’s experience using those features.
The easiest way to determine what is the needed set of features and how to build the user experience for your first version is by:
- Having in mind (again), what is your customer segment and to understand how they might use the product;
- Identifying what are the most important 1–2 use cases (flows) that you need to have built-in your product, to help users solve their problem or have a great experience.
- Determine what are the MUST HAVE features that need to be implemented, to make sure that those use cases have a logical end to end flow.
A simple example would be when trying to build a web platform for finding and hiring employees. If the main objective is to create a platform where recruiters can have a great experience when it comes to finding potential candidates and then hiring them, you should first make sure that features like “searching for employees + filters” and “providing the best search result for recruiters”, works seamlessly. It doesn’t matter that much if you will add a cool chat feature for the next steps, if recruiters will have a bad experience in the search and results phase.
So make sure you focus on the MUST HAVE features for the first version of your product, and make sure that you have a user experience that matches your user profile.
3. PR & Communication launch plan
Ok, you have the first version of your product almost done and you are ready to go to market. So now what?
There are different frameworks that can be applied, depending on the available resources. To increase the chances of getting users after the launch of your product, even if you don’t have a lot of resources for marketing, you have to make sure that you promote and talk about your product in the most efficient way.
By having a clear image of who is your target market, what are your valuable features and what is the user experience through which your users will be using the product, you can find certain channels that can be cost-efficient and easy to scale.
For example, if your product is the recruiting platform, you should reach out to recruiter communities and make sure that your message is in accordance with their values and how they do their job.
A simple messaging framework that we use:
To increase the chances of success, make sure that your message is well connected to what your product can offer people now, and in the form that they will relate to.
