Hacker News Reader

Comment by DecayingOrganic | Hacker News Reader

Marketing, sales people, and such are all great but if you don't have product-market fit yet, you're beating up a dead horse here by focusing on growth. One of the first things I do when starting a new SaaS is setting up an event tracker (think mixpanel). At this stage, you barely have any users so no need for fancy analytics stuff. I just stare at the event log until I figure stuff out. Why are they not clicking on that button? Why are they skipping this card? Lots and lots of problems can be discovered and tracked by this way.

After all this, if I have a weekly user retention hovering around 30%, I can't be more happy. Then it's time to grow.

View on HN

Back, when I did heavyweight GUI development, I went onsite for the first few customer installs and watched the customers operate the system (usually after fixing some bug LoL). Those always gave me basic UI tweaking ideas, but the real lightbulbs would come on when I asked questions like "why didn't you just do X instead of Y" or "how would you change this to make it easier". Or various other generic questions, the answers were frequently enlightening about how to tweak training materials or the UI, but I usually got one or two killer ideas that were more significant and ended up being the kinds of things later users would rave over.

So, I can't help but think you missing the most important changes if your not actually talking to the end users about what they are thinking or why they are doing particular actions that aren't always what you expect.

You’re absolutely right, I do need to spend more time with users and really listen to them. It’s just my ego doesn’t want to be hurt so it feels safer just looking at the event log lol

Agreed. The best example for this is Hallway usability testing: give the app/website to someone random walking the hallway and watch them try to navigate the interface and analyze what they easily do and what they can't understand.

When we develop products we (all the team) tend to get used to knowing where is each functionality and how to use them, but someone unfamiliar might just not find what we "simply" find.

I once asked a room full of developers how many of them had watched people using their software. Almost none had. It still amazes me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com