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Everyone says to create a product that is loved (agreed), but how do you get constructive feedback in the early days? I've experienced that many users are unwi

Everyone says to create a product that is loved (agreed), but how do you get constructive feedback in the early days? I've experienced that many users are unwilling to engage in conversation, they test it and if they don't like it they leave and won't communicate why. Suppose one creates a new Whatsapp-like product, how would one, in practice, go about gathering feedback?

lincolnq 10y ago
If you're standing in front of them with a notebook in hand, it's hard for them to avoid saying something. So that's step one. Step two would be to interpret nothingness as (negative) feedback that your product wasn't interesting enough for them to bother commenting on. Which probably means you're not solving a deep enough problem. This problem is really hard for whatsapp-like products, since people already have their problems solved pretty well in that domain and so they are less likely to find a new product particularly interesting. If I were advising a startup who were making a whatsapp-like product then I would tell them to find a narrower niche where they could solve a deeper problem.
- euph0ria 10y ago
  On a product I worked on we emailed every user that didn't engage with the product after sign up and requested feedback on how we could improve the service, what is lacking etc.. tried many different phrases but it was about 1 in 500 that replied and gave serious feedback. Making current users even more happy is one way to go, they are more likely to provide feedback but it skews the perspective since we don't get any feedback on what the unhappy users were unhappy with. Now, suppose it is a Whatsapp-style product, there must be a way to gather feedback even for them?
  - robryan 10y ago
    I suspect a lot of people that never replied would be people the signed up but never got around to trying the product properly or people that immediately saw that it wasn't ever going to solve their problem. Would be interesting to correlate the emails with how engaged the user was after signup. Personally as a user the only time I would try to engage the creators is if the product was very close to my use case but certain aspects didn't work the way I would need. This being for B2B where a potential customer is going to be more engaged, B2C the reply rate to those emails is likely always going to be tiny.
nostrademons 10y ago
The "unwilling to engage in conversation, if they don't like it they leave and won't communicate why" is your feedback. Dirty secret that startup methodologies usually doesn't tell you: it's mostly trial and error. You observe people, you form a hypothesis about what they want, you put something in front of them, and you see if they want it. If they don't, change something. It's not unusual to require dozens to hundreds of iterations before you converge on something folks like. This is also why founders that are building for themselves have such an advantage: then you do get some signal about exactly what you might need to change, and why you would want it. You've got to know (and accept) yourself pretty well to be able to listen to it, though.
- euph0ria 10y ago
  Yes, I understand that it is a tacit feedback, but it is so binary that it is hard to infer something from it besides we need to change. Iteration, it feels like a company could use the run rate iterating and never figure it out?
  - nostrademons 10y ago
    Most do. That's why most startups fail, after all. The lesson to take from this is to get your iteration velocity up and your burn rate down. If you can, you also want to be extracting as much information as possible from the failures, so it's not entirely random, but even if you're brilliant and 100% paying attention there will still be a lot of them.
  - beat 10y ago
    Most companies actually do burn through the cash trying to figure it out, and fail. Early on, it's nothing more than an educated guess. Part of the problem here is that if you're actually creating something new, rather than a refinement of an existing product, you're in uncharted territory. Think of Henry Ford's comment about the customers wanting faster horses. That's not what they want. That's just the limits of their imaginations and experience. Great founders should be creating something the customers desperately want and need but couldn't even imagine or articulate. Henry Ford's customers just wanted to get from one place to another, faster than they could at the time, more reliably, and affordably. They wanted faster horses. He gave them mass-production cars that were affordable and easy to maintain.

lincolnq 10y ago

If you're standing in front of them with a notebook in hand, it's hard for them to avoid saying something. So that's step one. Step two would be to interpret nothingness as (negative) feedback that your product wasn't interesting enough for them to bother commenting on. Which probably means you're not solving a deep enough problem. This problem is really hard for whatsapp-like products, since people already have their problems solved pretty well in that domain and so they are less likely to find a new product particularly interesting. If I were advising a startup who were making a whatsapp-like product then I would tell them to find a narrower niche where they could solve a deeper problem.

euph0ria 10y ago
On a product I worked on we emailed every user that didn't engage with the product after sign up and requested feedback on how we could improve the service, what is lacking etc.. tried many different phrases but it was about 1 in 500 that replied and gave serious feedback. Making current users even more happy is one way to go, they are more likely to provide feedback but it skews the perspective since we don't get any feedback on what the unhappy users were unhappy with. Now, suppose it is a Whatsapp-style product, there must be a way to gather feedback even for them?
- robryan 10y ago
  I suspect a lot of people that never replied would be people the signed up but never got around to trying the product properly or people that immediately saw that it wasn't ever going to solve their problem. Would be interesting to correlate the emails with how engaged the user was after signup. Personally as a user the only time I would try to engage the creators is if the product was very close to my use case but certain aspects didn't work the way I would need. This being for B2B where a potential customer is going to be more engaged, B2C the reply rate to those emails is likely always going to be tiny.

nostrademons 10y ago

The "unwilling to engage in conversation, if they don't like it they leave and won't communicate why" is your feedback. Dirty secret that startup methodologies usually doesn't tell you: it's mostly trial and error. You observe people, you form a hypothesis about what they want, you put something in front of them, and you see if they want it. If they don't, change something. It's not unusual to require dozens to hundreds of iterations before you converge on something folks like. This is also why founders that are building for themselves have such an advantage: then you do get some signal about exactly what you might need to change, and why you would want it. You've got to know (and accept) yourself pretty well to be able to listen to it, though.

euph0ria 10y ago
Yes, I understand that it is a tacit feedback, but it is so binary that it is hard to infer something from it besides we need to change. Iteration, it feels like a company could use the run rate iterating and never figure it out?
- nostrademons 10y ago
  Most do. That's why most startups fail, after all. The lesson to take from this is to get your iteration velocity up and your burn rate down. If you can, you also want to be extracting as much information as possible from the failures, so it's not entirely random, but even if you're brilliant and 100% paying attention there will still be a lot of them.
- beat 10y ago
  Most companies actually do burn through the cash trying to figure it out, and fail. Early on, it's nothing more than an educated guess. Part of the problem here is that if you're actually creating something new, rather than a refinement of an existing product, you're in uncharted territory. Think of Henry Ford's comment about the customers wanting faster horses. That's not what they want. That's just the limits of their imaginations and experience. Great founders should be creating something the customers desperately want and need but couldn't even imagine or articulate. Henry Ford's customers just wanted to get from one place to another, faster than they could at the time, more reliably, and affordably. They wanted faster horses. He gave them mass-production cars that were affordable and easy to maintain.