Crickets even after Customer Research?

🔬 The Diagnosis

A while back I read a post on Reddit about a founder who spent 6 months building an app only to hear crickets. Now you must be thinking “He clearly didn’t spend a second on user research” but…

He did. He chatted, interviewed, talked to 50 Product Managers and founders to “come up with the problem, refine his understanding and develop a solution.” (His words, not mine). His app helped them to conduct customer interviews for their product.

And yet he was struggling to get his first users. So, what now?

💊 The Prescription

Well, I took the matters in my own hands and went Dr. House on it.

No traction even after extensive user research, what could it be?

→ Poor market awareness. People don't know it exists.

→ Messaging could be off. Value proposition is not clear so no one is interested.

→ He didn't validate the actual idea. People just said yes because everyone's a people pleaser. No one wants to be hated.

1. Let’s start with validation. Do people even have this problem?

   He used the words “User Interview” on his website. Traffic for the keyword “user interview” is 10K to 100K monthly according to google which is good.

   But the top searches are somewhat different than his app.
   

2. Now let’s see if competitors exist or not.

   I searched "tools for customer interview" and no saas had advertised on it. But I found blogs talking about tools.

   I checked some competitors and they had 20K - 100K views on their sites. So, competitors exist but they rank on other keywords
   

3. Now let's check Market Awareness.

   Do people know his business exists? Nope. 0 traffic on his site, and he did just one launch post.

After this mini-investigation, let’s draw the prescription.

1. He needs traffic. Like NOW.
   For long term, he should do SEO. Check what keywords his competitor is ranking on. Check their offers, and pricing. Can also start running ads.
   

2. Need 50 people to try the app.
   Before any change he needs to get 50 people to try it for FREE. Gather feedback, use their words to change the landing page, and so on.

   I’d start with LinkedIn because that’s where his target audience is.
   

3. Do the No Brainer thing

   Since his app targets founders who want to conduct user interviews, he should
   First → USE IT to take interview of those 50 people
   Second → Go on Product Hunt to connect with new founders who need it.

And that’s how we diagnosed his SaaS and discharged him! :P

📚 Deep Dive

Continuing the same topic, there’s an amazing book that teaches you how to take customer interviews “The Mom Test”

​It’s about how to stop your mom from lying to you about your 'brilliant' idea before the market does 😛 

It’s got pretty neat frameworks and I’ve boiled them down in this post here →

🚀 Founder Vitamins

You should start building audience on the side if you have a B2C SaaS and what better way than social media.

But a lot of founders lose their way because of the overwhelm.

That’s why I use Hypefury. Simple app to schedule everywhere, and pretty neat features to convert impressions to email subscribers.

Try it here.

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❓ Case on the Table

Let’s practice your marketing muscles.

Question of the Week

You’ve posted about your product on LinkedIn, but no one signed up.

What’s the first thing you’d do to fix it?

Reply to this email to answer the question and get a shoutout :)