But let’s face it - users are never going to tell you what they need...or what you should build.
Shouldn’t they have spent more time building a great product first - before launching it? Those retention numbers to me say the product wasn’t working.
I doubt Apple asked any users for input when coming up with the iPhone.
Maybe there was never a product market fit in the first place, but the early feedback was that there was.
But maybe the product wasn't executed well and that's why it failed. Or there was an audience but it was far too niche.
That's the point, we just didn't even know why it failed.
We wouldn't use it to ask the users what to build necessarily (thought there are use cases for that) but more understanding why they DON'T like it...
even that would have given us a clear idea of what to change first and ignore the rest...
"Onboarding" is critical, and every single step not only Can lose customers but Will lose a certain percentage. Too many steps and your failure rate is compounded. Even losing 10% at each step means losing half after 6 steps.
In an app that requires at least 2 people to work (I work on one of those for a living), I'd guess that the 1st person tries it, finds nobody else online to interact with, and gives up instantly. We solve that by putting an Invite feature prominently in our onboard process. New users connect with someone almost immediately.
Actually our flow included invite by SMS, email etc really early on and was pretty simple (we did a bunch of early usability testing)...but still we got very little connect rate, less than 10% of users. Never really figured out the main reason why, just speculation.
I'd be curious what you are seeing in your case... maybe we could have improved it in other ways.
I work at Sococo. You can try a trial - its free - and see how it works better than I can describe :)
In a past web forum I used to admin the users would ask for a million different things and if we implemented them all it would have been chaos.
At the end of the day someone has to have a creaive vision and see it executed, even if it only does one thing.. but does it really well..