We are fighting change
by Faisal HouraniHad 2 meetings today with marketers.
Key learning is it’s normal for early users to not sign up immediately.
They already have their own workflow, and possibly a million other things they want to do.
Unless your product is solving an immediate need, people are going to need more reminders and incentives to sign up.
Ways to help early users sign up faster:
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Have an easy to access demo of your app which they can try (without signing up) to see the value it can provide
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Make sure sign up process is super simple, and share a quick video / instructions to show that
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Sign them up yourself, after the demo, ask them to sign up and help them get started, it shouldn’t take long and they will at least on board
On a different note, no matter where you are in your journey in building a product, the number 1 advice is: talk to more people in your target audience or mentors.
They will help you see things you can’t see, in fact you need their input and help.
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number 1 advice is: talk to more people in your target audience or mentors.
agree as a bare min. But it is not what will give the AHA's quickly. It is actually more precise than this.
- Be laser clear on the target audience. Often an app has more than 1 target audience. I see many apps failing to go beyond initial traction as they have been myopic or bias in their target audience.
- Rather than talk only, talk + experience. Any SME that gives you 2min is better playing/using something and talking at same time than 'talk' only. You will get context and context is king in getting any user.
For example you seem to be targetting "marketing agencies" as your sole audience. Correct ? why not SMEs. Many SMEs do without marketing as have experienced little value add. Or what type of marketing agency is your niche.
We are fighting change
- I dont agree with your post title and if a dev has this mindset, they will hit problems. I do get your feeling some-what frustrated.
- New solutions, are not "fighting" anything. Fighting is a strong word. Having being in business / human transformation for yonks, I can tell you it is not this.
It is simple. Even the most BS-resistant SME-er, who only have 2min max, will signup if within 32sec they see or better experience value. AND the signup gives them immediate use of this value.
- It is even better to experience value with NO signup. Trust the value of your product rather than using another marketing tactic.
- If your struggling to get even 3 citizens who would use your solution, there is a very real reason. Sort that out. This number 3 is not linear but rather Fibonacci ratio - so 3, 5, 8, 13 in a count concept to start a snowballing effect. Each activated person becomes a WOM-er naturally (human nature).
For me, the site is missing an immediate experience to validate value. Within 32sec ideally. GIF. Animate your claims (VP) on the website with less than 1 min GIF. Demo can be the longer version of UX. NOTE: this only works if in fact your VP is correct. So make sure you have validated that first with at least 3.
Do you have 3 active citizens who want to use your app, if your app was finished, would use now (no payment) or would use now (with payment) ?
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thank you for your feedback, appreciate you taking the time to review this.
re targeting SMEs:
SMEs was the initial target audience, and I learned that they are not a good audience for a marketing analytics solution because:
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most are too small (most online businesses barely have any monthly orders)
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they get a ton of cold email trying to sell them the same value props (more sales, save time, reduce costs etc)
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they are hard to reach, not exactly into trying new tech and the owners are not accessible usually
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when they are a good size to need services, they either hire a marketer or work with an agency, and they don’t want to be looking at analytics, they just want to grow profitably and let someone take care of that
re fighting problems:
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you hit the nail on the head by sensing that I am frustrated and I am very curious how? that’s amazing
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the experiencing and learning I am getting is that the target audience usually has a way of doing what you are offering (specially for B2B)
and you are asking them to basically use a different solution, and change the way they work
so let’s say you are an agency owner, who has a team of people with SOPs already to review clients analytics and take actions
and you now get an offer to try a new tool that’s promising to help you save time and do it better
for you to start using that tool, is not as simple as sign up and start… you now need to educate your team on using it, change in SOPs might be required.. and that’s assuming the tool actually delivers on the promise and doesn’t have issues that cause more problems (ex: inaccurate data and reporting)
so there’s a massive investment from your side to use to a new analytics tool, when a big part of your job is looking at analytics
agree with you though if you can deliver immediate value (and there is no big changes required on user end), people will sign up quickly
what do you think based on this?
re landing page value prop:
- how do you validate a VP?
from what I am seeing now, agencies / marketers are liking the product in demos but they are not super excited to start using it immediately and I believe it’s due to a few factors, one being changing how they currently work, other being they need validation that the product actually works properly and accurately
- currently have exactly 2 citizens who want to use it, and 1 more is looking for “reporting” feature more than “recommendations / suggestions”
thank you
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