What do you do if users don't talk back?

I would worry less about a few people not talking back and more about creating users.

Often people will reach out to you (usually complaining) and you can use that to either adapt, improve or pivot the product.

"Talk to your users" is just complaints in bulk being romanticized.

Get more users, eventually you will find some that talk.

Most of your users won't talk back or answer no matter what fancy hip new way you try. I don't know why there is probably a psychological reason people are like that though.

They can still talk to you with metrics and analytics. So make sure you are tracking what they are doing inside the app. That can sometimes tell you more about them and what they are doing.

Also when you reach out try not to make it sound generic introduce yourself and tell them about the app I've found that helps break the ice. And also timing.

Maybe don't send it on a Monday or Friday, people are busy and trying to work. Try different emails and different times and see what works best, AB test your contact. It's different for every niche and target audience there is no one do this it works every time.

I think the key is to make it easy to let your users start conversations with you. One way to do this is by using livechat software like Intercom. If you have real users, you should receive questions and inquiries that you can then turn into longer conversations.

Another simple way to start conversations is to shoot users a short welcome email when they sign up. I think it is important to make the email VERY short and simple. If you send some long-winded sales-sounding email, users will just ignore it. The welcome email I send to my users is less than 150 characters.

So I ran into this exact problem a few times. I think some of the suggestions here are great (make it easy for them to talk to you, include links on the page, etc.), but what's worked for me every time is simple bribery ;)

I'm only half-kidding! User feedback is one of the most valuable bits of data you can get, so invest some money into it.

Depending on my user base, I generally offer users something like a $50 Amazon Gift Card for "20 to 30 minutes of your time", and my response rate is usually around 25% for that offer.

If that feels like a lot, think about this: Everyone's time is valuable, and if the user is going to take time to help you make your product more valuable, he/she should be compensated for that. $100-$150/hour is a rate almost anyone can appreciate, and if you don't get a $50 idea out of speaking with a user for nearly half an hour, you're either not asking the right questions or not speaking to the right user. So put some time into both of those choices before the outreach.

I'd be curious to hear how you're asking for feedback. I find I get a huge response when I ask what problems they'd like solved vs how they think about my product.

I'd try to phrase things in a way that shows you're trying to make the world better for THEM, not that you're looking for feedback for YOU.

Also, I typically get really poor response from a cold email outreach. Having something on the page when they're live in the product typically gets better results for me.

Post an example of the mail you typically send.

Truth is that your email is competing with all the other more important things vying for a persons time - it's low priority.

Most won't respond, but a small number will. Usually that's good enough.

Unless you're building a community or audience, most users probably won't talk to you. That's OK! But you should make sure at least a small percentage is replying to emails / willing to converse with you once you have a statistically significant number of customers.

If people aren't talking with you, experiment with how to reach out to them. Add a "reply to this email" email to the end of your onboarding sequence, encourage people to jump on livechat, or even ask if you can schedule a call with people. Maybe even cold call people! Matt Mullenweg is the co-founder of WordPress.com and Automattic and he's been doing this to ask how people are using / working with Gutenberg.

Tools like Intercom have started to reinvent how customer interaction works so paying for a tool like that might also be helpful.

Just my two cents! :)

That sounds like a frustrating situation. But good on you for trying to get out there and talk to people regardless!

"Talking to users" can be pretty broad advice, and it's difficult for a lot of people to get started -- from recruiting people to talk to you, to figuring out what to say to them that gets you useful information.

I posted this in another comment, but I wrote a short blog post to help get off the ground: https://medium.com/@mjwhansen/getting-started-with-user-interviews-in-3-steps-10a6868fcb5f

Key off of something a user has recently done. Sign up is a common one, but often not that impactful in my experience. Find a key action they've taken in your app -- for us, that would be uploading a spreadsheet, or creating an API key. Here's an example of the email we send after they create their first API key:

"Hi there,

I notice you recently created your first Geocodio API key. That's awesome!

I'm wondering -- is there anything in your opinion that we could be doing better?

Whether it's something that frustrated you, was unexpected, or something you hoped we supported but didn't, I hope you'll share any thoughts you have relating to getting started with or using our API.

We're always looking to make our tools easier to use, and your feedback will be really helpful for us."

Some people will send you a line or two, some people won't reply, and a small number will be willing to hop on a call. (It really depends on the person.)

If you want to dig a little deeper, I'm happy to do a video call with you. I'm one of the organizers of the DC Jobs to Be Done meetup and helping people get started with user interviews is my jam because it's so impactful in product development!

Just keep up the good work and make your service great.

If it provides value to the users, they'll just show up.

Of course you can provide some easy channels for them to reply (ex. intercom).

But users that are willing to spend time talking to you are as rare as "angels".

If there was a problem: somebody would complain - believe that! Even with a free service!

If they keep using the service, and keep coming back: then silence is a message. A la Sherlock Holmes and the dog that didn't bark.