Product Management: 5 to 995 or engine failure on take-off

Recently, I received a question from my friend about the following content:

Good afternoon, Michael! Now I am engaged in one research work. Considering your professional experience, I would like to ask you to answer the question:

You released a product that you did for a year, spending all the investments on development. Of the 1,000 first users, 995 deleted it or stopped using it the very next day. Describe your actions.
Thank you in advance!!!

I started answering right in the Facebook window, but I realized that the answer is very voluminous and completely in the wrong format. In addition, I decided to share this information with everyone. I hope someone will find it useful.

In general, I had the opinion that about the success of the product can be said about six months later. Marketing campaigns, PR, and just word of mouth - things are quite long-term, and the information must have time to spread. However, if your product was successful from the first day, this is immediately noticeable, but such products are the subject of a completely different article from the Success Story category. We’ll talk about what to do if both engines failed on takeoff.

I will begin with the fact that you should not spend a year of work and investment on a product without a preliminary assessment of the audience and at least some testing. In addition, understanding the audience of the product can greatly help even if the initial conversion was “5 to 995.”

Proof of concept

For example, we very often put up a product for an early subscription. Those. we’ll prepare all the materials on it in advance, but instead of the download button we put the “keep me in the know” button, clicking on which the potential client leaves his mail and name. After the product comes out (for example, in beta), we write messages to such comrades (sometimes even personal ones), provide a product for testing, collect feedback, etc.

Accordingly, already in the middle of the way we know how popular our product is and how much We have potential customers who are so interested in them that they fill out a form on the site and leave their address.

The second - when spending investments, do not forget about marketing and sales. If at the time of the start of sales the budget received from the investor is completely consumed, you are in serious trouble!

Suppose that this situation did occur, and you, without a budget, were left with a product that is used by 0.5% of users of all those who are interested.

I see several options:

You have not reached the target audience

Those. those 995 people who did not use your product are not your customers. They don’t have that problem, the pain that your product relieves, or they hoped to solve some other problem with it.

A good example in this sense is the multi-sized “fingerprint scanners” for the iPhone. They are downloaded in order to protect their data from strangers, but, making sure that this is just a clever (and sometimes not very) fake, they are immediately demolished. But people leave such a product, the task of which is simply to have fun with friends. In fact, these are those people who like to show card tricks in the company.

In this case, there are two ways. The first one is to try to understand what those 995 people who deleted were expecting from your product, and then make changes in such a way as to interest them. Given the fact that the entire budget has already been spent, it is necessary either to negotiate with investors for a new round of financing (this can be done once) or bootstrap, i.e. tighten your belts, sell cars, garages and apartments, and finish the product yourself. However, no one guarantees that you will succeed again. According to statistics, only 10% of projects take off, so it's up to you.

The second way is to understand why these 5 people still left your product, who they are, what tasks they use to solve it, and why they chose you. After analyzing these users, you can enter a completely different, sometimes completely unexpected market. For example, such a useful and widespread product as diapers was created during the war for the needs of the army. Diapers allowed the sniper to remain in one position for days, without being distracted by natural needs. If you look at the market now, then the main target audience of their manufacturers is not the Ministry of Defense.

Therefore, if you flew with the target audience, do not despair, but look.

Your product was not able to solve the problem that should be solved

Again, there may be many reasons why this happened. For example, it is difficult to work with it, and 995 users simply could not figure out which buttons to press.

Please note that you may not notice this complexity, as This product is dear to you, you know all its details and the smallest nuances. But look (or rather listen!) To an accountant who must type a SQL query string to receive data, and you will understand. But for any programmer it will not be the slightest labor.

Products with a high entry threshold are almost doomed to low conversion and a very narrow niche.

Is it bad? Perhaps your product is really unique (such as 3D Max or Autocad). But in this case, you need to reconsider the target audience (instead of the mass audience, we get single professionals who could not satisfy their perverted needs with competitor products), pricing policy (the product goes into the very unique and expensive segment), and also the sales strategy (move from mass promotion to targeted work with individual customers).

I have friends who sell equipment for nuclear power plants. Do you know how many nuclear power plants are in Russia? That's right, 10 active and 6 under construction , including one floating. And after all, business is going and developing!

If your product does the same as everyone else, it’s only more difficult - you will have to start processing it again. Make it easy. More wizards and fewer questions for the user. Do everything for him that you can, do not ask unnecessary questions and, for God's sake, do not force to enter SQL in the form for displaying data!

But what if everything is completely bad?

Your product is terrible

Unfortunately, this happens. The user deletes your product, and then for some time angrily pours out his attitude “to this craft” in all kinds of twitter and facebook.

Once upon a time I wrote how you can evaluate a product from an emotional point of view and measure its “degree of pleasantness”, so I won’t go into psychology in this article, but walk along the top.

I have been communicating with users of our products for a long time and I myself am a user of hundreds of products of other developers. Usually this feeling occurs in two cases:

Firstly, most often, users quite naturally get emotional about the huge number of errors that prevent them from working. Indeed, imagine that your product throws a window with "Unhandled Exception" every five minutes, preventing the result from being saved. Presented? Will you use such a product or demolish after several such falls?

Secondly, users are often frustrated by non-standard product behavior. For example, imagine that when you press Ctrl + S, a text editor closes the document instead of saving it. Or doesn’t offer to save the document when switching to another mode, as the beloved Report Builder did for SSRS 2008 (if someone came across this “feature”, then I’ll understand what I’m talking about).
And finally, the biggest problem is when the creators of the product simply do not think about users. I have a favorite feature in the state portal. services (in general, by the way, very useful), which perfectly illustrates this approach.

How many of you at least once transferred the difficult history of your professional life from a work book to a form for obtaining a passport? Remember the session that expires after 15 minutes, after the expiration of which you need to log into the system again, and all data is lost? I think it was made so that only students who haven’t worked anywhere else or computer maniacs who are fluent in the blind, deaf and dumb 22-finger typing method can get a passport. Agree that this is terrible!

So, if your product is terrible - urgently look for the source of this horror and correct it. Otherwise, he will simply go to the trash along with your efforts, a year of life, cubic meters of coffee, a dozen burning eyes and, by the way, investor’s money too.

What to do

“Well, analyze and be smart all the way” - you say and you will be absolutely right - “You better tell me what to do now!”

So, what to do when your product is deleted 995 users out of 1000.

We look at those who download

Carefully analyze who downloads your product. What sites do they come from, what search queries bring them to your site (if you haven’t attached Google Analytics to the site yet, do it immediately!).

Based on this, you can understand whether these people are your target audience, those you are waiting for.

For example, if you sell accounting systems, and 1000 people came to you from a banner on a porn site, then 5 stable users ¬– this is just a giant conversion rate for traffic of such quality.

If they’re obviously going wrong and not from there, it means that your product is not sinking, but its promotion. Form relevant search keywords, think about promotion on specialized sites where those you need are hanging out, in general, engage in normal Internet marketing (or better, hire a team of professionals if you have any money left).

If people go from where you planned, you need to understand what they want. To do this, you need to get feedback from them.

Getting Feedback

In my opinion, one of the most important points is to get feedback. Moreover, getting it from those five who use your product will be much easier.

We use questionnaires. Moreover, not "for that", but "for the present." This is usually a certificate for Amazon. The amount of remuneration depends on our budget, the number of people interviewed, and also on how much this person is valuable to you. We stated an interval of 10-25 dollars, depending on the completeness of the answer.

It is very important to think over the content of the questionnaire. Ask exactly those questions for which you want answers. Moreover, the clearer the questions are asked, the clearer the answers will be. Keep in mind that people have little time, and your $ 15 will be for most of them not a generous fee, but simply a pleasant trifle. We use something like thisprofiles for those who bought and those for those who refused to buy. By the way, according to statistics, only about 3-5% of those who sent questionnaires respond to such polls, so be mentally prepared.

In addition, we use another survey method. When a product is uninstalled, a dialog is shown to the user in the Uninstall form and it is offered to choose the reason for uninstallation: installing a new version, rejecting the product due to lack of features (with the ability to specify it), etc. All this information is recorded in our database and we periodically analyze it. Do not forget only that a lot of users will just poke the first answer option from above, so there is something unlikely to be put there and then just ignore this option.
By the way, if during the installation a user registered his product by entering a name or email address, then he can easily be “caught up” and personally discuss the reasons for removing the product. Of course, with each user this trick will not be possible, but, in general, it works quite well.

Well, the last way to get feedback is to automatically send error messages. You can, for example, wrap all unprocessed errors in a letter and offer to automatically send them to your server. This way you get complete (or almost complete) information about how often such errors occur. I will not say that, of course, no personal information can be transmitted.

Try again

Based on the feedback, you can understand why users need your product, how they want to use it, and why they didn’t succeed. Draw conclusions, apply different models, look for a market, concentrate on unique features.

Try different niches, different options. In the end, try writing another product;). The main thing is not to despair and go where you are
planning!

Successful products and high conversions!