Listening to your users: False positives
We launched Sonar with Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare support. Shortly thereafter, users buffeted us with requests for Linkedin integration. Ostensibly, they wanted to use the app to meet fellow professionals.
Eager to please, we rushed to add Linkedin. The net effect? Nada. My guess is that the people asking were not actual users, but rather people that wanted to be users. We had mistaken noise for signal.
Lesson learned:
I would use your product if only you had X feature is a dangerous signal to follow. Users do their best to anticipate what they want before theyve seen it but, like entrepreneurs, they are often wrong.
Enterprise companies should validate demand by asking customers to put their money where their mouths are. Media and social networking companies should double down on analytics to find, observe, and build for actual user behavior.
Listening to your users: False negatives
One of the most requested features was a map like foursquare for our check-ins. Instead, we appended a simple @Sonar to content that users shared from our app. Although we had designs for a map, we never got around to building one. We were too busy building the future of ambient social networking!
Mistake. People didnt like the bland @Sonar text string so they stopped sharing updates from Sonar. Their friends never engaged with our updates in the first place. Facebook noticed this and started hiding our posts. Instead of optimizing for actual user behavior, we spent countless whiteboarding sessions trying in vain to design an alternative.
Lesson learned:
You are probably not the Steve Jobs of ______.
Removing friction from existing user behaviors (e.g. checkins) almost always has a higher ROI than building castles in the sky (e.g. hypothesizing about your API). Find all the dead ends/local maxima in your current products before building new ones!
Growth vs. Engagement
We received conflicting advice from lots of smart people about which is more important. We focused on engagement, which we improved by orders of magnitude. No one cared.
Lesson learned:
Growth is the only thing that matters if you are building a social network. Period. Engagement is great but you arent even going to get the meeting unless your top-line numbers reach a certain threshold (which is different for seed vs. series A vs. selling advertising).
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