How do you get your customers to talk to you?

Hi Dashiell,

Great question! It can be tough to get the ball rolling. Here's what I suggest

Step 1. Find where your customers are. Maybe it's Reddit, hacker news, a slack change, here

Step 2. Engage the community. Provide insights or articles on things they might be interested in. If you're working with AdTech, write a post talking about increasing revenue. If you've got competitors with bad products ask for a product review.

Step 3. Once you've built the relationship, talk to your first few potential customers and use their insights to create more content. Use that content as a loop. Interviews -> Content, Content -> Interviews.

Eventually, you'll become an expert in your space and people will start coming to you without you having to reach out!

If you can't engage a community or find out where your customers "gather" maybe you're looking at an industry that's too small or solving a problem that doesn't really bother anyone. If that's the case, time to re-evaluate.

If you want to share your idea here, I'm sure some of the other members would be happy to brainstorm with you!

Cheers and best of luck,
Ari Bencuya

Do you ask simple questions?

"Hi! I see you use [product]. What's ONE way this product could be better?"

People have different preferences for giving feedback. Some never do it, some want to reply to your email, some are dedicated enough to have a videochat with you.

When I'm asking for feedback from GummySearch users for a particular feature, I pick a subset of my most engaged users, and those that have used my app in a way that I know they might be a good fit for this feedback round.

I email that subset of users and say why they are getting this email from me (so they know it's somewhat targeted). I also phrase my thoughts and ask my questions in the email, as well as ask if anyone wants to talk over videochat. This is super clutch bc some folks might be willing to take the time, while some just want to reply to the email and be done with it. I've had responses to the email weeks after I've sent it, people get busy and you just want to make it easy for them to give feedback when they have the time for it.

I remember a talk from Rahul Vohra where he said that once a customer replies to your first email just try to keep them talking for continuous feedback. But like you, I've found that getting that first reply is difficult (even when it's a heavy user!).

One way I've tried improve user feedback over email is by contacting non-activated and churned users.

I send an email with a basic question (e.g. "Why did you stop using Tella?" or "How come you haven't made a video?") and then include a numbered list of possible answers. The email ends with "Just reply with a number".

This lowers the effort needed to reply and when it coverts I get a warmer lead for additional feedback (e.g. "Thanks for the feedback! If you've got a sec, can you explain why...").

For understanding non-activation or churn — generally pretty opaque topics — I've found this to be pretty useful.

Yes, getting responses can be hard, and getting useful feedback is even harder. This may have gotten worse with almost all companies bombarding people with survey/feedback requests all the time. I don't know about you, but I don't want to fill in a survey every time I ask customer support for help...

Only a small group will respond. Just expect that. This makes getting early feedback hard, as it'll be a fraction of the few users/customers you have. Getting feedback gets easier as the number of users/customers increases.

The good news is, if you're persistent (but not annoying), then you'll eventually meet someone who cares enough about whatever problem your business is solving that he/she will go into great detail.

Actually I used to have this problem too. It would be quite frustrating to see efforts go in vain

So I try to select people who have been vocal about the potential problem & then casually engage in conversation with them right when I start building. And then I try to ask them for feedback. They are more willing that way, when they already know you before.

But for cold email, I change my mindset that even 5 positive response from a total of 100, would be really valuable if a customer unveils important insights as that might give you a fresh perspective.

I highly recommend reading The Mom Test or at least the Wikipedia article about it. TLDR: Ask you customers about their problems. As others have mentioned, you need to find where they hang out and pounce on them to ask them about their problems. If done right, people love to spill about what bothers them. My product is a photo app for parents. Luckily, I'm a parent and I "get" to go to soccer games, PTA events, etc. Every time I see a parent take a picture, I hurry and ask "Hey what are you going to to with that pic? What issues do you have doing that?"

Since your product is for creators, I would try posting in creator subreddits - "What's your biggest problem monetizing?" Or go to some meetups and just ask them what's bugging them (https://www.meetup.com/topics/content-creators/). Or maybe DM on Instagram "Hi, I love what you did with XXX. I'm doing research for a class. What are your biggest problems every day with making this awesome Insta?" All this is IMHO. Best of luck!

Hey Dashiell! I've been going through similar challenges. Here's what I found:

Need to offer something in return from the get-go. I've experimented a bit and found three things that work:

• Offering small Amazon vouchers (this only after the 'lead' has been pre-qualified, and thinking long-term, the investment here isn't that much if you think about it...and most people don't even accept it anyway.
• Offering to do customer research or analysis of their landing page or something along those lines. This for your customers could be some analysis of their profiles or funnels or something.
• Offering to do some lead gen work for them.

Not the most scalable, but early on doing this for 30 people has a huge ROI I believe. Hope this helps :)

We use a mix of human emails and incentivised surveys (fill in this 5 min survey to be entered into a $50 Amazon voucher draw). This tends to hoover up both sides and begins the conversation where you can get deeper insights.

I have a "demo call" link on our site and majority of people who schedule calls are leads that are interested in our product -- I can ask them questions to get to know their needs and pain points better.

Sometimes I also get customers who use this link to schedule calls because they want clarification on something or they want to do X. And I take this opportunity to ask them questions too.

You can also use a pro-active msg / pop up asking if they want to do a demo call -- which I also use on my site.

I have been trying a lot for this answer.

Hey Dashiell,

I remember while I was working on my previous start-up the best thing I did was to find the champions; the people who really loved the product.

So maybe, in your case the customers who either have the most transactions and who can't stop talking about it. These people are the ones who will help you understand and often also connect you with others who use your platform.

I'd put more effort into finding these initial 10 people who love what you're doing and then slowly start building from there (this is also takes a lot of time but definitely worth it).

& I'd always reach out to them from my personal email and not company email as this would give it a more "authentic touch".

Hope that helps :)

For my main product (CurlsBot), I get them to talk to me because I participate in spaces where they are active. It takes a long time for people to trust you if you aren't already part of these communities though. My bread and butter is Reddit and Facebook.

For the rest of the work I do (primarily content strategy), I mainly talk to people on Twitter. I've gained a following just by posting and interacting a lot.

You can also try starting your own community. I know that's worked out well for Notion, for example.

The response rates from your users are going to be low. Most people have no interest in providing feedback.

I've received most of my feedback from friends and family. It's clearly skewed, but it is available. I've also had some decent luck with Mechanical Turk, but that's going to cost you a bit for a good amount of feedback.

I know some other people that have had decent luck with offering gift cards for feedback. That could be worth a try.

I would try giving something extra before asking. Not sure how your revenue model works or if you are able to give something that will grab their attention enough and make them want to reply.

But, make sure your email sounds like a person is writing specifically to them and not like a newsletter or updates email.

I was thinking about this topic more and asked some other founders for their thoughts. I got a lot of cool ideas and put them together in this blog post: https://www.tella.tv/blog/how-to-talk-to-users

Hope it's helpful. Keen to hear what you think!

I usually ask my customers for an interview not after the first transaction, but after they have been using my product for a while. And I offer them an incentive right away, in the subject, making sure they open the email. Like a discount or a "free forever" account.

That said, sometimes it's more important to interview unhappy customers, and I still haven't mastered this.

I think asking a direct question that customers are interested in is a helpful way to start conversations? e.g. "What do you hate about your job?" People are often eager to talk about their lives and things they do a lot!

Have you tried offering $ gift cards? If you have a little budget that helps, I've known a lot of user researchers who do that.