Running a startup business comes with a lot of challenges. One of the most difficult things is to decide if your product is good enough for sustainable growth. Your existing users can give you invaluable feedback that helps you discover areas where you can improve. But perhaps most important is that you can find out if your business is ready for scaling or not by asking them the one question that matters.
Finding Out Your Users’ Needs
Sean Ellis, Founder and CEO of Qualaroo, is well-known for his knowledge in marketing and user acquisition. Sean was previously the marketing executive at Dropbox, where he grew the user base fast in a short amount of time. According to Sean, one of the most important parts of scaling your business is to find a product/market fit. That is when you know that you’ve created a product that fulfills your target users’ needs. This is answered by asking your users one simple question. The question that Sean advises startups to ask their users is:
How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?
- Very disappointed
- Somewhat disappointed
- Not disappointed (it isn’t that useful)
- N/A – I no longer use [product]
Understanding Your Users
How should you use the result from this question? If you find that over 40% of your asked users are saying that they would be very disappointed without your product, you’re definitely on the right track. This means that there is a good chance that you have found your product/market fit and you have a product that is scalable. Great!
If more than 60% of your users say that they would be somewhat disappointed or not disappointed at all, you need to figure out why. Perhaps most important is that you learn what the somewhat disappointed users think of your product. This is because they’re telling you that your product is only “nice to have”. Based on what you find out you have to make changes to your product so that these users will become very disappointed if they can’t continue using it.
What if you find that most of your users could live without your product? Well, then there’s two things you can do. Either you stop working with the product or you change it completely. Assuming that you’ve already spent some time with your product, I think you should try changing it rather than giving it up. Use your users’ feedback to try and figure out what direction you should choose instead.
Sending the Right Survey to Your Users
Sean Ellis has formulated more questions that can help you reach the 40% benchmark. Most of the questions are open-ended so that you can get actionable feedback from your users. I’ve created (and used) a survey for Responster based on these questions to get feedback from our users. You can try it out by clicking on the button below:
[button link=”http://form.responster.com/014kJx” color=”green” newwindow=”yes”] Try example survey[/button]
How many of your users should you send this survey to? Well, the more users you get to answer the survey the better. But, as Sean says, you should make sure that the asked users at least have:
- Experienced the core of your product offering
- Used your product at least twice
- Used your product in the last two weeks
Learning what your existing users think about your product is something you should do today. It’s easy to do it and you’ll get invaluable information. And by using this information you can steer your product to an even better product/market fit.
In case you want to make your own survey like the one found above, you can do so for free with Responster. Just click here to get an account.
Good luck!
Ludvig