How interviewing my users is improving my product! (and how you can do it too!) ✨
Hey community!
It’s been a long time since I’ve written a post, I’ve been working heavily on the growth of ruttl. There have been tons of developments, which I am excited to share with all of you! But let me start with the most important one today.
Until now, my team and I were focusing a lot on product and UX, but customer feedback has also become an important part now. I recently switched from collecting textual customer feedback to video based interviews and it has been extremely valuable!
In these interviews, we try to understand if we are meeting benchmarks of our users.
The idea is pretty simple-
I send out emails to my users, hop onto video meetings and have a good conversation about the product for 30-35 minutes.
This is giving us benefits on multiple levels, like
- Our users are sharing great feature ideas that I could’ve never thought of + it’s helping us fix bugs faster.
- It’s become a platform for people to express both negative and positive aspects about ruttl
- We are focusing more on shipping the features that people are requesting during the interview sessions
- The calls are helping us express our gratitude towards our users
- This is a GREAT way to build social proof!
Since I’m also running a slack community, I’ve come to the conclusion that feedback is at the heart of building momentum around your product.
If anyone in the community wants references on how to execute this idea, feel free to check out my customer success stories page.
P.S - If you have ideas to help me improve, please do share the same in the comments section!
Cheers,
Harsh 💯
Im curious about if Im in early stage, do I need to do this qualitative research at the beginning? or should I try simple customer feedback by just trying my product directly?
Also, thanks for your great post!
Great post @harshvijay. I do also believe that video is a great way - possibly the best - to collect qualitative feedback about your product or idea, and even more importantly the problem you are solving.
Is there any tool you are using for video interviews? We've built a platform that helps you easily create highlight reels of the most important moments in user interviews: https://envsion.io . Would love to get your feedback on it!
Right now we are not using any specific tool but thanks for suggesting one. Will check this out for our next interview and share feedback with you for sure.
Understood. Good luck!
As someone who has lead an end user feedback pipeline with my last company, I can resonate with this so much.
@harshvijay - Curious on why your pricing page has pricing in the descending order of prices instead of the ascending order which is the common. I am wondering if there is a reason for it. Is there? Thanks in advance.
Thanks for the comment and really liked the question you have put up here reason behind showing pricing in the descending order is simply we can show lower prices in front considering the reading starts from center to right.
Thank clearing that out for me. I am always on the lookout for different pricing pages. :)
This is very recognisable. Even before launch I’d created a beta group for my app. Obviously they get new versions earlier than the rest, and try and spot bugs in return for that.
However most value comes from talking to them! They have so many thoughts and requests, they’re basically steering my roadmap for me.
I use a combination of TestFlight (for beta distribution and getting feedback with screenshots) and a whatsapp group (with all the beta people). In whatsapp they can see eachothers feedback, this often leads to finetuning of ideas. Also I can immediately notice when an idea doesn’t resonate with other testers.
That really works with the community. And it also makes them valuable as their requests are heard and solved. This also helps me to collect genuine feedback fo my product.
Congrats Harsh!
I'm a huge fan of Slack communities, especially since I live and work alone. It's like having coworkers on demand.
Quick note - for your customer success story titles, don't put a question mark at the end. There's no ending punctuation needed and having a question mark comes across as "we might have solved the customer problem?"
Your website is fantastic (no surprise there!) and I LOVE that your pop up is a customer success story - stealing this idea, it's such a great way to show that you're customer centric!
Plus your testimonials, the colors...Great, great job!
I will definitely keep in mind about that punctuation feedback for next time. And thanks a lot for the compliment, hope this pop up idea works for you as well because it works great for my users.
Hi Harsh
Great to know your experience building Ruttl, thanks for sharing it.
While slack is good for team communication, it is not ideal for building a community or for customer support and you won't be able to host it on your website and the content won't be indexed by Google. You cannot control the reach of your content as well.
Thus if you are interested in growing a community/forum then you can look at existing community platforms. I am one of the co-founders of UUKI, a community platform designed for this and we are currently on Appsumo as well. Happy to discuss with you a potential collaboration
Hey man, pitching your product is great, but this feels pushy and very self/company-centric instead of founder/customer-centric, which is the exact opposite approach to take when marketing a community forum tool!
I'd try chatting a bit and then mention UUKI organically if and when it makes sense. No need for a hard sell if it's what they person needs (I don't know if it is or isn't).
(and don't put "thus" in the pitch, it feels super snobbish)
Hope that helps! :)
That's great Harsh!
We have been also conducting customer interviews for feedback on our alpha version. We even got positive validation of what we were building on and one of them suggested also a good direction where we can take our product too!
Yes, it works great while building your product and being user centric.