Some time ago I got a question from my friend:
Hello Mikhail! I am making some research at the moment. Taking in mind your professional experience I would like to ask you:
You launched the product that you developed for a year and spent all investments. 995 users from the first 1000 uninstalled the product or stopped using it on the next day. Please describe your actions. Thank you in advance!!!
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I began to write the answer in the Facebook window, but shortly I understood that the answer was too extensive and was not of the format. Besides, I decided to share this information with everyone. Hope you will find it useful. In general, I’ve got an idea that you can say if the product is successful in about half a year. Marketing campaigns, PR, and just word-of-mouth are quite long-term things and information needs some time to spread over the internet. |
However, if your product is successful from the very first day it is noticeable, but such products are the subject for an absolutely different article such as Success Story. We will talk about what can be done if both engines failed.
I will begin from the fact that you shouldn’t spend a year of work and investments for the product without prior estimation of the audience and some tests. Besides, understanding the target audience can be extremely helpful even if you got initial conversion of “5 to 955”.
Proof of concept
For example, we often offer early subscription for the product, i.e. prepare all materials related to the product in advance, and add “Keep me informed” button instead of the “Download” button. A visitor leaves his contact information (name and email) upon click on this button. When the product becomes available, for example as Beta version, we contact these subscribers (sometimes even send personal emails) and provide the product for beta testing to get the feedback.
| So, on the half-way, we know how popular the product is and how many prospects who are interested in the product to the extent that they even fill out the forms on our website we have. Secondly, when you spend investments don’t forget about marketing and sales. If you are out of budget by the market launch you’ve got serious problems! Suppose it happened and you’ve got the product used by 0.5% users form all those who showed interest and got no budget. I see the following options. |
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You haven’t got the target audience
I.e. 995 visitors who refused using your product are just not your customers. They don’t have the problem your product solves or they hoped to solve a different problem with it.
A good sample is various fingerprint sensors for iPhone. People download it to be able to protect personal data from unauthorized access, but when they see that this is just a clever (and sometimes not very clever) fake they immediately uninstall it. The product is not uninstalled by people who want to have fun with the friends. They are persons who like to show card tricks to the friends.
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In this case, there are two ways. The first one is to understand what those 995 people who uninstalled the software expected from it. Then make changes to get them interested. Bearing in mind that you’re out of budget you either need to convince the investors in making new investments (may work once) or to bootstrap, i.e. pull in the belts, sell cars, houses, etc. and complete development on your own. Though no one can guarantee it will work out. Statistics say that only 10% of projects succeed, so it’s up to you to decide. |
The second way is to understand why these 5 users haven’t uninstalled your product, what they are, what tasks they solve and why they chose your software. By analyzing these users you may move to an absolutely different and sometimes unexpected market. For example, such useful and popular product as nappies was created in times of the war for military needs. Nappies allowed a sniper to stay on the position for days without distraction for physical needs. Looking at the market today you see that the target audience is far from the Ministry of Defense.
That is why if you missed your target audience, don’t panic and continue searching.
Your product doesn’t address the problem it should
There are multiple reasons as well. It’s complicated and 995 users just didn’t get what buttons to click.
| Note that you may miss this complexity since the product is native for you; you know all the details and smallest peculiarities. But look at (or even better listen to!) an accountant who has to enter SQL query to get data and you will understand it all. But this is not a problem at all for any developer.
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But in this case you need to revise the target audience (instead of mass audience we get single professionals who were not able to satisfy their sophisticated demands with the competing products), pricing policy (the product becomes unique and expensive) and sales strategy (switch from wide promotion to client oriented work).
I know a guy who sells equipment for NPP. Do you know how many NPPs there are in Russia? Right, 10 operating NPPs and 6 NPPs that are under construction including the floating one. And the business develops and prospers!
If your product does the same things the other products do, but is more complicated you will have to revise and redesign it. Make everything as simple as possible. Add more wizards and ask as little questions as possible. Do everything you can instead of your user without asking too many questions and, for God’s sake, don’t make him enter SQL queries in the data preview form!
What to do if the things are completely bad?…
Read the rest of the article here.
