Writing / Hunter Harris
The Product Works. Did You Ship?
We’ve all been there. You do the demo, and someone says “Sure! Looks pretty cool.” or “It’s definitely good” or the dreaded “It’s fine.”. Death by a thousand cuts, damned by faint praise. You’ve put your heart and soul into getting this product out there, and it lands flat. I’m not going to cover every cause here, but I want to cover a few I’ve seen recently.
OK… What Is This, Really?
This is a classic case when you’ve built from ideas, without trying to test hypotheses early. Usually, it’s a combination of Wrong Product, Wrong Buyer, or Wrong Timing. This is about the flattest land possible. You’ve got something cool, and they go “so?”.
Wrong Product - even this is a slight mislabel - it’s more like Focus on Solution, Not Problem. You’re out here building something to solve a problem, but does the buyer or user actually care? If you’re mitigating a side-side priority while your buyer has a gaping chest wound (or alternatively, something else they’re really excited about), they just won’t have room to be excited for what you build.
Wrong Buyer - kinda the flipside of Wrong Product. You might be solving a real problem, but the person who’s buying just doesn’t care much about it. This is more of a problem with enterprise sales + account selling, and there are a few ways to mitigate it at this level. The core idea would be, find who your champion is, and have them sell the buyer on the solution. The worse situation here is when the business as a whole is not your ICP, but that’s closer to Wrong Product (for that customer) anyway - market exploration is necessary for a lateral move, and you might just find a better thing to build!
Wrong Timing - this is really Wrong Product, but time bound. They might have just solved this problem, or they might have more urgent priorities to solve first. Talk to em and figure out what priority number uno is.
Don’t Make Me Think
Seen this one very often - I land on a product page, and I’m immediately afforded a choice. Maybe it’s “For Admins” vs “For Engineers”. Or maybe it’s “choose a tier”. Maybe it’s something else!
But here’s the problem - I’m landing on your page, knowing nothing about your product, generally speaking. (If you’re reading this, you’re probably in this bucket! Hopefully we get you out of it soon.) That means you’re actually putting two decisions on my plate: 1) choose whether I actually care about this thing in front of me 2) choose a tier/persona/etc.
The end result is that potential customers bounce! They’re busy people, they’ve got stuff to do, and they don’t need another job to do.
That’s right! An explanation of why a customer should care is your job! So make sure you do your job and explain why a customer should care (or at least, who should care, and why) about your solution. What problem does it solve, for who, giving what results. Assume people come in fresh because at first they are - there’s many more potential customers out there than you have users, even in large applications!
I’m confused
An extension of the above.
Acronyms all over the place. Sure hope your ICP (<- irony is not lost on me, ideal customer profile) knows what that means! Confusing pricing. So you have a combination of subscriptions, seat-based pricing, and usage based pricing? Please, pick one, and help me model my expected cost! I’m not interested in your solution if I can’t afford it Too many choices / too many clicks. Don’t make it hard to get around, or hard to get the information I need. If I’m not interested yet, I can just leave. Even if your solution would be a “weird not to buy” - because I can’t get that far! Same thing in two places. Classic “easy to get lost”. Makes us think “what’s the difference?”.
Look. What you’ve built? It makes sense to you because you built it. But the people coming your way? They’re busy. They’re tired. They’re undercaffeinated. They don’t want to read. They don’t want to care. They just want to get on with their day. And you probably want to get some money from these people in exchange for your goods or services!
So make it easy for them! It is your job to make it easy on them! Easy to understand, easy to use, easy to sell, easy to expand.
A release to prod is just that: a release. Code’s there, functionality is there. “If code sits on production, and no one uses it, did we ship?”. No sir and madam, you did not ship. Shipping means it’s in the customer’s hands, they’re using it, and they’re seeing value from it. If you’re seeing the above, you may be far from shipping. Get out of your head, get out of your business, and get in front of customers, and understand what they’re interested in.
Do your job, make it easy, and ship.