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Comment by AlBentley | Hacker News Reader

Our experience when trying this approach is 90% reply with 'lack of time' which is not the true reason but basically means the product didn't solve a major problem for them.

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Not necessarily. I solved most "lack of time" issues by improving onboarding. People thought they didn't have the time because the setup steps seemed daunting or confusing, so they put them off indefinitely. Improving the "first login" experience, moving to a more walkthrough/wizard-based setup (only one thing to do on the screen at a time), and building more 3rd-party integrations that eliminated technical work allowed me to retain more customers. I was solving their problem -- once they got past the hurdle of starting to use the product.

Absolutely. I'm a picky user who will delete your app in 30 seconds if the setup path isn't obvious and reliable.

I think you're probably just a reasonable user.

Yes. If a company doesn't even manage to optimise the onboarding experience, it's unlikely that they optimise anything.

It depends on your audience as well (surprise, you need to understand who will be using your product). What we've found through AB testing with the game I work on is that our best (read: highest-value) players are very experienced with this type of app even if they're not tech savvy, and a tutorial is a nearly meaningless roadblock to them because they already know.

To clarify what I mean by "doesn't solve major problem": it actually might solve a major problem for them but due to shit messaging/ UX/ onboarding/ trust/ bugs/ whatever they haven't realised it.

So you are correct but all those things I just consider to be part of the product as a whole.

> which is not the true reason

Wait, how do you know this isn't true? Maybe your product had so much friction that they just didn't have the time to learn it, get on boarded, etc. Seems weird to dismiss approx 90% of feedback you're getting from users as being lies.

It's not a lie, though.

It just means they saw some value in the product but didn't feel enough motivation to actually follow through and signup/use the product.

This is similar in many ways to someone answering "it's too expensive". The value prop is either not strong enough, not being marketed well enough, too complicated to start using... or the product is solving a pain point that people don't care enough about to build a business around it. Which is a serious question the OP needs to ask themselves. Unless their traffic<costs>conversion rate ratio is sufficient.

You can't expect customers to articulate that everytime (10-20% seems about right to me) because most people aren't actually thinking their actions through when visiting a landing page. Especially when it's via an ad... not something they searched out on Google or via referral.

Even if they did tell you they wouldn't necessarily know why... because you're assuming it was a rational thought process, or something they spent time thinking through, which is rarely the case. Books about how customers acting 'irrational' [1] are very useful at explaining this and are important to always be considering when doing marketing/UX design.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expand...

We definitely do NOT dismiss it!!! It just means you need to spend a lot more time finding the real reason, or maybe you are getting traffic from the wrong group of people who have no interest in your product anyway.

Good example would be Product Hunt or Techcrunch as a traffic source, mostly useless for any testing as everyone on those sites is just interested in 'new products' or startups and is unlikely to be in your target demo.

> true reason but basically means the product didn't solve a major problem for them.

How is that not a true reason?

If a product isn't valuable enough for users to spend time on it (or it doesn't save them time), you don't have product market fit.

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