What should you build NEXT? Don’t ask but listen to your customers. 🦋
We got fewer pairs of hands and more things to do. How do we decide what to build next? Every time I asked an expert, I received one piece of advice. Ask your customers. But here's the problem. Either customer asks different things, or sometimes they say one thing and behave opposite. Have you ever experienced this?
The world is fast becoming customers centric. Just listen to the buzz in the customer experience, service market in the last couple of years. What companies like Intercom, Drift, Tidio are doing is that they are making it easy for you and your customers to talk to each other, ask questions, and get help. But what I am going to ask you is to go a step further, take the collaboration at a much larger scale. I was hoping you wouldn't ask them what Should I build next, instead bring them together and listen to what they talk about when they come together to discuss ideas.
Build a community around what you do, not your product but the problem or cause your business represents. Allow people to discuss ideas, exchange help, tips, and stories about their life. On the other side, you share your behind the screens - what's on your mind and let them react to it. Schedule a group meeting with your customers once a week or a month and talk about each other's life. If the opportunity presents itself, then talk about what you are working on.
Please don't ask them what they want, but listen to their conversations. Maybe a problem that a specific customer has can be solved through work-around tips shared by other customers without you stepping in to build a new feature.
Collective intelligence.
Build a community around what you do with HABITATE.
I think one of the hardest thing is listening to common threads amongst customers as opposed to just 'listening to customers' When you've two customers the trajectory of your product is v much decided on which one you listen to, Mr A wants X, Mr B wants feature Y - when your hands are limited that is a tough thing to manage. It's only once you've 10+ customers that you can start to figure out what the market actually wants, versus servicing individual requests and become a custom software shop for one person, and sometimes that means turning down a feature request.
Rightly said @paulbot. Sometimes, building everything that people ask for isn't going to help either.
For me, it is listening to their stories. Right from my first customer, I started having weekly calls, first I started it as one-one and then I randomly picked 2-3 people and clubbed together. I try to deviate the discussion from feature requests and keep it about their daily life, how's their community growing (since my product helps them do that), and then general topics.
If lucky and observe closely I hear a couple of things they desperately need.
This is NOT marketing. ROI is the stories you get to listen to.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
Why do you think so? Could you please let me know your thoughts in brief.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
Hey! Thanks for mentioning that. If you think about it, Running the open-source code on the cloud, email notifications, maintaining the code, building new features is all going to end up costing as well.
We don't see habitate as a glorified forum, but a community where you can write blogs, collect feedback, answer support queries, manage upcoming events, and much more.
Let me tell me, how we price things out.
The storage space, managing custom domains, SSL certificates cost us too.
Plus, we take money to improve the product while you focus on your business continually.
There is no point in restricting admins or MAU's like our competition does and for the same reason we mention we don't charge for that.
And then add we add profits to it.
And for start-ups since the pricing looks a little steep, we have created a 0$ plan and custom domain at additional 30$ a month.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
Thank you. Best wishes to you too.