How do I acquire feedback from my users?
Hi everyone,
I've been a long-time reader of IndieHackers, speculating that one day I might launch my own Saas product online and have my own questions to ask.
A couple of weeks ago I launched a side project of mine (shameless plug: https://postkit.io). I notice that most of my users sign up, perform one or two actions and then never come back. We often hear this startup mantra of "Do things that don't scale" by "talking to your users", but how do I actually go about doing that?
I've had about ~10 conversations through Intercom and some over email. I'm asking everyone I speak to for some kind of feedback or something to go on. Would it be innappropriate to email my users directly? Should I send out a survey? What feedback gathering tools do you use?
Tim
Not at all. They gave you their email for a reason. They have a problem and want you to solve it for them. If they are not willing to spend a few minutes giving you feedback over email, then this problem is not important enough for them (which is good to know) or they are busy. But you should be emailing every user who signs up in early stages, IMO. The ones that respond will be your best users.
I think this is just what I needed to hear (and seems to be the general consensus). I think I've got an aversion to doing this because I don't want to spam people.
I email my users directly. It helps to ask them why they wanted to use your product in the first place and if what you've built is either solving their problems or not.
Non-responses are actually responses too, they're just harder to glean information from. A non-response means they don't care enough to even attempt to give you constructive feedback. It means you're farther from your goal than you'd like to be and it's time to think of big changes that need to be made to the product rather than small tweaks.
Another thing that has helped me is that often times users won't know how to provide the feedback you actually need. It helps to talk to experts who have talked to many users in your demographic. For PostKit that sounds like people who are or used to be API evangelists or more technical biz dev folk. They can see your product and probably imagine the kinds of responses from the hundreds of users they have discussed APIs with over the years.
How will I know what changes to make if I don't have any feedback to go on?
Thanks for the advice. Really valuable to hear your opinion.
Hi Tim,
I've been studying this subject for the last couple of weeks once this is a common and shared problem all business faces (digital and offline).
In my opinion, there is no other way but level up the game and use what has been moving the humanity for millennials: money.
I'm putting this project together where I'm literally transferring people money if they answer a well crafted and detailed churn survey I'll send on behalf of my customers - people like you.
I already have the right template (like I said, lot of research) and now I'm just polishing the service which should be launched by the end of this month..
Check it out: May I Ask Why - MIAW: https://miaw.landen.co/ and tell me what you think.
Victor
For feature and bug feedback in a "general" way I use this tool I built called BugFeedr: https://www.bugfeedr.com/ - I just add a link on my sites back to a feedback form and users can provide whatever kind of feedback they want. You could include the link in emails too or embed the form directly on your site.
Tim,
I see you use Intercom. What you will find is that most of your convos will turn out to be feedback when you dig deep enough (unprompted feedback within a conversation is the highest quality feedback). This is why we built Userfeed. Allows you to easily gather feedback within Intercom convos and close the loop with those users if/when you ship the things they care about, all the while, using the customer engagement platform you already use: Intercom. Feel free to give it a try, or reach out with any questions:
https://www.userfeed.io
Hey Tim!
It's absolutely NOT inappropriate to email your users! :)
In fact, I encourage you to do so. SaaS (and lots of other companies do it all the time) If you want, feel free to add me on Linkedin and I can tell you more about how best to write the subject line and the best way to write the email so that you can get the most number of responses.
I see non-copywriters struggle with this all the time so let me know if you need help :) AND - after you get to know your users more, you can create more persuasive copy because you'll understand the language they use.
Cheers!
Seeing as we're shamelessly pluggin' anyway: have a look at https://www.getuserfeedback.com/ (my latest project). While it doesn't gather feedback from the users that signed up, it allows you to get feedback on your landing page by your target demographic. Do people that sign up even understand what it is they are getting? What is their impression of your company? Etc.
Alternative solutions would indeed include Intercom (which you appear to be using already; what feedback did those users give?) or popup polls like Hotjar offers (but you would need quite some traffic to get a significant amount of results for that).
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