Just had our 25th feedback phone call!
by Pierre de WulfOur product is an API so gathering feedback is complicated as our users don't spend a lot of time on our website. They spend most of their time programmatically using our product.
And while everybody seems to agree that gathering feedback is essential in the early stage of your product. Getting your users to answer a question, a form or a phone call can be a difficult thing to do.
Over the last month and a half, we managed to have that many phone calls by doing a simple thing: we multiplied by 10 the free plan for people who agreed to spend 15 minutes on the phone with us.
Basically, our API offer 1000 free API calls to every new user, once they signup, they can see this big CTA saying:
" We need your feedback 😊 ! Schedule a call with us and earn 10 000 free API calls after our little chat!"
Just this, with a link to our Calendly: https://calendly.com/.
Because we only handle the free credits after the call, nobody only scheduled a call to have the credits and the average duration of the call was closer to 30 minutes than 15.
Hope this little tip can help you.
How did you manage to gather feedback from your users?
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What are some questions that you ask in your phone calls?
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What business do you run?
What are your uses cases?
How do you currently solve your problem?
How much do you pay to currently solve your problem?
Are you happy with your current solution?Those are the 5 main points we want to know but we don't ask them right away.
The goal of the game is to let the users talks as much as possible.
The good thing is that most people LOVE to talk about themselves so it is not a difficult thing to do.
We are just here to give some direction to the talk in order to discover what we want to know.
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Smart move - give away something that costs you very little for feedback you can base your company's direction on.
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Thanks !
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Nice one. Free usage increase is well with the first feedback!
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I see you are from France. Is English your native language? If not, do you experience any difficulties while talking to English-speaking users?
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Yes, we are French! English isn't our native language but there isn't any particular difficulties with English-speaking users (99% of our users...)
Sometimes I have to ask the person I'm having a call with to speak slower, but generally, it's smooth :)
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This is such a great idea! Thanks for sharing.
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Thank you!
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I sent out an email to users today that asks for feedback in return for 1 month free paid plan! Hoping to receive serious feedback :)
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This is a great idea, I was thinking about putting my personal phone number (as a bit of a gimmick) into the dashboard of our app, to encourage feedback - but I'd wager multiplying free/cheap tier is much a better value exchange for customers.
Is there any feedback from the calls that really sticks out in your mind?
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Yes,
Through our call, we discovered that many peoples did not really understand what we were an API at first and did not really grasp the concept of concurrent request.
This is the kind of feedback that allowed us to improve our copywriting on our landing page.
We also managed to create some kind of "persona": the typical customer profile for our product.
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This is brilliant, thanks for sharing this!
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Thank you !
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Nice work! Have you learned anything valuable from the calls? Has the direction of your product or your roadmap changed in any way as a result of insights from the calls?
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Definitely!
The biggest paying customers (basically every custom plan and even $99 plan) come from a call.
So from a sales perspective, the call is a really powerful tool. It's easier to answer each questions, to create a connection, and to really know if ScrapingNinja is a good fit for the user.
About our roadmap, the simple answer is yes. We gather a lot of feedback / use cases during the calls, and we choose the next features based on this feedback.
It's not only the calls, we also have some forms here: https://www.scrapingninja.co/api-store and our roadmap is based on the most wanted features.
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Nice idea. I definitely need to do more of this.
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