10,000 Passionate Users

Now with new products, you often have to identify your core users, identify a beachhead, if you will. What is the best way to do that? And how do you then go and expand from there?

Yeah, I think there's a, was it a thousand or 10,000 and passionate users theory, right? If you could just find some people who love your product, figure out why they love the product and then figure out there's enough of them for you to build around. So there's two sides to it. There is the passionate users. They're going to tell you exactly what they want. What data and most people forget is actually someone else is giving you data. And those are the people who walked away. And so being careful to listen to your passionate users, how do you expand from there? How do you double them or triple them? How do you continue to drive engagement? But at the same time saying, hey, look at our funnel. 70% of people are walking away within 24 hours. What did that tell us? What was it about the onboarding experience? What was it that they're saying to us? And I think making sure you balance both the passion, as well as the indifference, that is the most important thing to actually building great and lasting products.

But if they're indifferent and they walked away and they never told you why they walked away, how do you even get data from that?

That is a really interesting question. One thing is being that you have a channel. Like get a focus group together of people who are walking away and actually saying, hey could you do this survey? And I've just seen when people churn from a product, when they leave a product, they have very particular reasons why. Hey, I didn't really understand the onboarding experience. Oh, this didn't feel like it was for me, it felt like it was for someone else. And I’ve seen some of these focus groups. I remember one time someone said your product makes me feel stupid.

Oh my goodness.

Because it was so complex that they could not get their head around what the product was doing. And so nobody wants to feel stupid. And so they said, I couldn't make heads or tails of it, so I… And so you'll notice it like hearing those points of view, remind you how important these small points are. And just by making some small changes, you can change the trajectory of that.