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Product direction based on audience feedback - an approach

Recently, we came to a bit of a crossroad on which direction to take our product in. This post describes one of the tools that we used to overcome this.

In this post, I’ll give some background, describe the problem and then go on to what we did to overcome this problem.

🌄 Some background

Outline is a tattoo booking platform. In short, we offer customers a place to browse and purchase tattoos from vetted tattoo artists in London. For artists, we offer a platform for them to showcase and sell their tattoos.

the outline website

For our purposes, we can identify two types of tattoos that people purchase: a pre-designed tattoo (often called flash) or a custom tattoo which the artist draws for a customer. The purchasing journey for these two types of tattoo is quite different. For flash, there is usually a set price and customers pay upfront. For custom tattoos, artists will often charge an hourly or daily rate. This means that it’s difficult to know exactly how much the tattoo will be until it’s done. Every artist does pricing a bit different, so this is a generalisation, but it’s a pretty good picture of what happens.

🔴 The problem

As you can imagine, building a platform to sell flash tattoos is a lot easier than building one for custom tattoos. For starters, we know up front how much the tattoo will cost, so we can take the whole payment when a booking is made. This allows us to easily take a percentage commission for each sale. It’s also very visual, so it’s a good way to get potential customers interested. Building custom bookings is a much harder problem to solve.

When we launched a few months ago, we only built a platform where people could purchase flash. Our plan was to launch a custom bookings feature a month after our initial launch. After our initial launch though, we realised how difficult it would be to get paying customers. Most of our paying customers came from a launch party that we held in London, and we found it very difficult to get any more. This was mostly expected, but still hard to deal with.

We experimented with different marketing strategies, including ads, but we had a hard time figuring out who our audience actually was. We have a decent following on Instagram - just over 2000 followers - but we were not sure what they actually wanted from us. Instead of going ahead with building custom bookings, we decided that we would first get some data from our followers to see what they actually wanted. By collecting this data, we would make a decision on whether we should continue building the custom bookings feature, or stick to only selling flash. It would also inform us on what the audience for each option looks like.

📊 The survey

We built a survey by creating multiple Instagram poll stories. Each story would be one question, and they were mostly multiple-choice stories. We asked the following questions:

  • How many tattoos do you have?
  • Would you pick flash for your next tattoo?
  • What style(s) of tattoo do you prefer?
  • Would you book online
  • If no, why?

📈Results

We got a total of 61 followers who took the survey. It’s difficult to analyse story responses on Instagram, so we went through each one and put them into a table on Notion.

results

Once we had the data, we were able to create some basic formulas to come up with the following interpretations:

  • There is a positive feeling for booking and paying online. 75% said they would book online.
  • The “perfect” tattoo count for being pro online booking is 3 to 6 tattoos.
  • There is a positive feeling for custom bookings. 67% would make a custom booking for their next tattoo.
  • Blackwork is consistently the most in-demand and favoured style.
  • Decent demand for traditional, simple linework and Japanese style tattoos.
  • For those who didn’t want to book online, the main reason was that they would want a consultation first. When we asked them more about this, most said they would be happy with an online consultation.

🤔 Our thoughts

Firstly, running this survey allowed us to talk to our followers much more than we had ever done before. It gave us a chance to get to know them more personally, and we found that they were more engaged with our posts after the survey.

The results were interesting; we all assumed that most people would want a custom booking, but we also found that those who wanted custom bookings would likely have fewer tattoos, be less experienced and would probably need more guidance. On the other hand, those who wanted flash already had a fair few tattoos and knew what to expect.

It was great to see that both types of customer would mostly be ok with booking online. That was a relief.

We also had some unexpected results around what styles people liked. We figured there wouldn’t be a massive preference for one, but blackwork was clearly it. This wasn’t super relevant to our decision, but still an interesting result.

💡The decision

At this point, we had two lines of reasoning in the team. On one side:

Building the custom bookings feature will allow us to tap into a larger market. This could in turn lead to more sales.

On the other side:

We are already having a hard time making any sales and trying to sell to a larger market will likely make it even harder. We should double down on flash tattoos.

After some more discussion, we decided to stick with only selling flash for the following reasons:

  • We can really focus on the specific needs of this niche, rather than diluting the product by trying to satisfy everybody.
  • We have some understanding of who this market is now, so we can build closer relationships with them.
  • Since it’s a smaller market, we can try to convert people one by one through a direct sales approach. This makes sales a bit more approachable.

☀️Today

It’s early days, but so far this decision has been great for us. We’ve built a direct sales strategy based around DMing potential customers on Instagram (based on our audience data) and we have had a bit of success so far. I'll write more about that in a later post, once we've had a bit more time 😀




If you’ve come this far, thank you very much! Really appreciate the time that you’ve taken to read this, and I hope that it was helpful in some way.

If you want to stay in touch, you can follow us on Instagram at instagram.com/outline.wtf

  1. 1

    Yeah, reached the end of the article :) Really nice one. Though I would suggest reading the "Mom Test" and doing more open-ended interviews. I did something similar for a nocode tool, first was a survey, second was open-ended interviews and learned much more from the latter.

    1. 1

      thank you! :) this exercise led to us having more open-ended discussions with our followers and it was definitely valuable to get that insight. We'll need to do more of that in the future.

      I did read the mom test but it was a few years back now, so I'll re-visit it. Thanks for the heads up!

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