Ask HN: How best to get early feedback from users?

Yeah, YC advice about contacting users is pretty aggressive. What they want to see is your project having the potential to go "viral" but that doesn't really work for all projects.

But it is still good advice. What I do is send out an occasional email to update users on any issues we've had and upcoming updates, and I always encourage them to call me anytime if they're having trouble or need or thought of a change or new feature. And I generally make light of it, telling them "Hey, I get lonely sitting here coding all day, so any excuse will work for me" (Maytag man).

The point is I try to make it very easy for them to contact me. I make a point to tell them "It's always my fault if you're having trouble". And when they call I make a point to listen.

At the beginning of this year we shut down 3 old versions of our app after setting up accounts for all those users on our new app, so I got to talk to a lot of users who'd procrastinated and I made a point to ask them if there were any changes or new features they wanted or needed and I got a lot of great feedback, but in most all of those cases they contacted me and I made a point to follow up with emails and phone calls.

During the months leading up to shutting those old apps off I made a huge number of bug fixes and tweaks and added some new features to the new app, all based on user feedback, and it is a much better app now. So the importance of that is spot on.

In fact, now again my phone and email are quiet. Pretty much only new users and just a few of those contacting me. For me, that's a relief after having a very hectic previous year and it's indicative of the app maturing and working as expected for users. But I couldn't have done that without them. And it was pretty overwhelming because there were a lot more bugs than I expected.

So now I'm able to once again spend some time "marketing". The product is polished enough for promoting now and I have some ideas on who and how to market it to.

Developing is my passion so that's hard for me. I am going to take a crack at it though.

Really good info.

> The point is I try to make it very easy for them to contact me. I make a point to tell them "It's always my fault if you're having trouble". And when they call I make a point to listen.

Do you do anything in your product to make it easy for users to contact you? For update emails, what periodicity has worked for you?

I apologize for the slow reply. There are email and phone links on the home page of my apps and I have a "News" page where I post about what I'm working on currently.

I don't send out a lot of emails though. Generally only when I've confirmed an issue that's important they know about and updates and upgrades.

How did you get these users? They signed up on their own through the app or website? With such a small amount of users, you should collect a phone number and just call them.

For figuring out which features a user wants, my old company tried this and had a lot of success. The product was aimed at small businesses and it was a dashboard to help them manage Yelp, Google, Tripadvisor, Foursquare, etc. listings all in one place. So we figured they would want to update their info like phone number or hours, so that should be one tab, and replying to reviews was another big thing so that was another tab. Those were set in stone. But we weren't sure if they wanted a tab for promotions (create a campaign and post it on Google, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and customers could redeem with a QR code and there would be analytics), competition (pick N competitors and track their ratings, reviews, etc side by side with yours), social media (see mentions of your business across social platforms and see sentiment analysis over time), or learning (a series of online videos that you could watch, tailored to your business based on different metrics).

So we built out the first two tabs (profile and reviews) but we had dummy tabs for promotions, competition, social media, and learning. Clicking those would popup a form where we would let them ask to be notified when the feature was available, with a freeform text field where they could explain why they wanted or didn't want the feature, or what they expected it to be. It turns out that competition by several orders of magnitude was the most requested feature, and promotions was a non-starter (only a fraction of a percent of users ever clicked on it).

> How did you get these users? They signed up on their own through the app or website?

Users install the app from an app store and sign up on their own.

> With such a small amount of users, you should collect a phone number and just call them.

I'm not sure what reason I'd give to ask for their phone number as using the product doesn't really need that. What do you think would be a good way to request users for their phone number during sign up, when the sole reason would be for me to contact them for feedback? I'm not averse to the idea, just can't think of a good way to ask.

> we had dummy tabs for promotions, competition, social media, and learning.

Wow, that's an exceptionally good idea. Something I can easily test out. Thank you!

I'm not sure what reason I'd give to ask for their phone number as using the product doesn't really need that

Hard to know unless you describe the app. In our case we had business owners enter their business phone number to look up their business listings on the various sites, and the terms for signing up allowed us to call. Someone else mentioned that if you get support requests, ask for feedback that way (e.g. "need support? request a call back")

Thank you. I'll see how I can add a 'request a callback' in my app.

+1, just call them.

But treat them like humans, and not a fucking strip mine.

1. Do you have user metrics where you can see who your top 10% of users are? 2. Work out who your top 10 users are and do what you have to do to get in contact with them. 3. Tell them you will be building features if they response to a survey. 4. Offer them $ to chat on the phone.

Thank you for the great tip.

1. Yes, I have those metrics.

Here's how I imagine I'd carry it out:

1. manually send an email with a link to a survey on google forms

2. if they fill out the survey, offer $ to chat on the phone

3. If they don't fill out the survey, pester up to 3 more times to take the survey. Use different email copy each time, gently remind them to take survey and reply in the same email chain.

In the 4th email, write "understand they're busy. If they get a chance, please take the survey. Thank you."

If you find problems with the above sequence, please let me know.

most people prefer a virtual gift card that can be emailed to them post-interview

That's good to know.

The right kind of user will be begging to throw money at you. Often they've hacked together their own solution at a high cost. They dry up quickly, but they're often out there.

If you have to be more aggressive, chances are you're targeting the wrong type of user. Your next business step would probably be to find a good channel for the ideal user.

> The right kind of user will be begging to throw money at you. I agree, that's the best kind of user.

> If you have to be more aggressive, chances are you're targeting the wrong type of user. Very true from my experience.

Would you agree that identifying the right kind of user is the most important thing for a startup? Or can a startup be successful even if they have not nailed down the persona of the right kind of user?

Yeah, they call it Product-Market Fit. Market is really the total amount of money that people throw at you.

It's easier to get that from finding a few people who are really excited, than it is to find lots of people who are only a little excited. Because if there's a few very excited people, it often unlocks a new mainstream market. Like Twitch worried they wouldn't be able to pay enough for content creators to make a living, but the ones they interviewed were happy just to make a really small amount from playing games.

Do you get any support inquiries? People should be more likely to respond to you after you helped them and already messaged back and forth a bit. Also, from the support messages you might already be able to tell what parts of your product need improvement or extension.

If you don't get support requests, try making contacting you easier at potential pain points.

I seldom get support inquiries. I'll look into making contacting me easier through the product. Thank you for the excellent suggestion.

Invite some subset of users to become beta testers. Create a Slack channel for them and engage there. Invite users for 45 min 1:1 calls where you ask them to do a few tasks they usually do using your product. Observe them, take notes, ask them why they do stuff the way they do, brainstorm about new features, etc. Pay well for these calls.

Really like your suggestion of inviting for beta testing. I will look into it. Thanks.

maybe you can add more logging into the application and then use that data to try out new features / understand which features are most used

No.

Just call them, don't invade their privacy, unless they're just meat to you. In which case, change industries.

Thank you @magn1fico, for sharing the idea.

@tata71, I believe it can be done in a privacy preserving way. Think simple counting to answer questions like 'how many users clicked on this button?' without logging PII.