Kano Surveys

My personal goals in 2022 were to focus on a single product idea, and reach 100 paying customers. This would prove to me that a) I could focus, b) I could make real progress if I did focus, and c) that the product idea has got legs.

Today I reached my goal of 100 paying customers! Technically that means I'm 12 days late but I'm ignoring that :)

Some stats:

• 20,000 visits to the site in 2022, viewing 112,000 pages
• 2,000 users signed up since I launched in 2020
• 100 paying customers, conversion from free -> paid still hovering around 7%
• ARR of £1,600
• Nearly 1,500 surveys created
• 12,500 survey responses received

All in all I'm pretty happy. The tool is useful enough that people are happy paying for it, and above all else I've really enjoyed building the product to what it is over the last 3 years.

What's next...

Well, my overall conversion rate from website visitor -> user -> paying customer is not brilliant so that could use some work. And my traffic is still pretty small.

The big question in my mind though, is who am I selling to? I've noticed 3 different personas in my user base so far:

1. Students and academics: I've had lots of students sign up, tutors have referred their entire class to me, and I've even had an academic institution enquire about bulk licensing.

2. Individuals: mostly this is people working in companies who want to use the tool themselves, whether they're a contributor or manager. Some big companies (see the logos on the homepage!), and some small, and some personal accounts who may be indie hackers. I've had one big enterprise enquiry too.

3. Agencies: product development or UX agencies who are likely to run Kano surveys much more regularly.

If I focus on one of these personas, my marketing and pricing strategies will be more targeted and effective.

Which leads me on to a new goal for 2023: to reach £10,000 ARR. Wish me luck!

Not a huge or meaningful milestone perhaps, but goes to show how long I've been working on this and how far the product has come in terms of improvements and developments of new features.

First commit was Feb 29th, 2020. Around 2.5 years ago. That first version was pretty barebones and lightweight, looking back. I'm much happier with the state it's in now. I've got a couple more major features to add though, still lots of exciting value to create for my customers!

It's a great idea to 'drink your own champagne' by using your own product for yourself just as a normal customer would. You get awesome insight into what it's like to be a user, you'll find bugs and usability issues that have been invisible so far, and can create fantastic content marketing.

KanoSurveys.com is no different and recently I've done exactly that. Netflix is one of my favourite services, is well known, has a super interesting history and market position, and has recently been in the news as it makes some controversial changes to its product strategy.

I set up a Kano survey to understand customer satisfaction for some of their current features, and a few hypothetical features that I invented. It ran for a few weeks, gathered 50+ responses from a broad spectrum of people, and then I spent a bit of time interpreting the analysis and writing up my thoughts.

I'm hoping this is:

a) An interesting bit of content that will do well for SEO and link-bait
b) A good case study to raise awareness and understanding of the Kano Model

Have a read and let me know what you think!

KanoSurveys has a major new feature - importing of survey responses. This means you can quickly analyse survey data that you've already collected through other methods (such as a generic survey tool, or even offline on paper!)

This is a new acquisition channel for the product. The Kano method is quite popular and many people are doing it already through their own set of tools, but then doing the analysis is the hard part where people are looking for help and templates. If I can get people onto the platform by helping with their existing data, next time they run a survey they'll use me instead of doing it themselves.

Lots of people have requested this feature through the site's feedback mechanism.

But it's complicated to build, so I hadn't tackled it in the past.

A while ago I set up honey trap to measure demand and understand the problem space. This was a page on the site that explained how I don't do analysis yet but invited people to send in their data anyway.

This helped me to understand how many people actually had data to analyse, and what format it was in. Based on a dozen or so files that were uploaded I could see a common pattern, and some uncommon use cases, and that was enough for me to design a minimum version of the feature.

So that's what I've built over the last couple of weeks - it works for most data formats but not all. If it gets a lot of usage and works well for acquisitions then I'll expand it to support more data formats.

I've also set up some analytics on the feature so I can see how people are using it. Now it's live, we wait and see what happens :)

Just crossed a major milestone - 1,000 registered users.

It took 564 days to get the first 500 users, and only 148 days to get the second 500. Traffic is up (thanks to more content marketing and referrals) and conversion is up (thanks to an improved product and improved sales website).

Obviously 1,000 people is a fantastic number in itself but I am also tracking a few other key metrics to give me an idea of the level of engagement.

• 51% of users have a survey live and accepting responses
• 88% of surveys have at least 1 response
• Surveys have 8+ responses on average

I haven't decided yet on what 'good' looks like for these metrics. Now I've hit 1,000 registered it might be the right time to review in more detail and set some benchmarks and targets to achieve.

And thinking about the metrics now as I write this, I will redefine some of them, for example the "live surveys" metric would be better to count historic events so instead of a snapshot right now, count how many users have ever had a live survey.

The one solid target I have for this year is 100 paying users. So far I'm one third of the way there, but I've just raised the price to a more normal level (before it was pennies) so we'll see if the market still sees value at this price.

I was never sure if KanoSurveys would have a place in the market: there aren't many similar tools so it's a pretty specialist niche within the broader survey tools market. But 1,000 registrations and gradually increasing traffic and engagement tells me there's still hope.

The integrity of the data the we can get from running a Kano survey relies heavily on how well the participants understand the questions they're being asked.

The survey format is a bit unusual, and so anything I can do in the survey itself to aid understanding will increase the value that survey authors will get from their data.

I've had feedback from a couple of users that they would like to be able to explain the product features they're testing more clearly, things like: rich text (bold, headers, bullets etc), images, videos, links out to Figma prototypes, and so on.

I decided to start with something simple for me to build and for people to use, and something that would deliver maximum impact to survey participants. Image uploads is the feature that meets those criteria.

Adding the image field to the survey creation form was pretty straightforward, and showing the image to survey participants was easy.

But since the application is hosted on Heroku, the filesystem is ephemeral - that means I can't save files 'locally' to the application. Instead, I had to figure out how to push them to S3. This took a bit of juggling but now works well.

With this feature I'm nearly at the point I feel comfortable raising the price. One more thing to add first.

My goal this year is to get 100 paying users. I'm not concerned about total revenue yet and so my price is still very low (will be raising it very soon though). I consider 100 paying users as good validation that the product is useful and has a place in the market. If people are prepared to pay any amount then they must be finding some value. All I have to do then is increase the value in line with the price.

So far all my traffic comes from SEO. I've been producing more keyword based long form content to attract the search spiders and maybe I'll write more about my approach to that in future.

But recently a university has featured KanoSurveys in their course, so I had nearly 250 students sign up to the site over the course of a week and a good chunk of them paid up for the Premium tier!

Now some people might not count these as "proper" customers because although they've paid, many cancelled the subscription straight away. But... they paid. So for my tally they count. And it gives me information about potential future pricing models (ie. one-off payments instead of subscription).