Having a product is a good start but the hardest part is crafting that product into something people actually love!
You need to figure out a bunch of stuff about your users…here's a starting point: - Who actually needs your product and why? (persona, problem) - What message resonates strongly enough for them to care? (value prop, positioning) - Why are some customers sticking around? (product benefit) - Why are some customers leaving? (value gap, positioning misalignment)
This is WAY harder than it sounds (speaking from personal experience)!
And basically no one does it well. (only 10% of SaaS companies have quantified buyer personas)
I think the big reason is it's actually REALLY hard to consistently talk with customers.
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Ok, here's why it's difficult to consistently talk with customers:
1. First, it's super inconvenient for customers - Most don't want to "jump on a call"
2. Second, if you do get them on a call - you'll likely get bad data - Humans don't like giving other humans bad news - You're at risk of confirmation bias or to just start selling (I'm guilty of this) - Consistently capturing this data / scaling this process is v time consuming
3. Third, surveys are another option but they mostly suck - Understanding customers requires depth which surveys lack - you need to ask 2-3 WHY questions to understand the root insight (and ideally get concrete examples to make that insight objective rather than subjective) - People have survey fatigue and don't take them seriously
4. Fourth, another option is to email "please give us feedback" - This is ok but it puts all the burden on the customer - Ideally you want to give them a bit more to work with than that
5. Fifth, drawing conclusions from qualitative data has historically been difficult - I.e. word clouds aren't that useful - It's difficult to extrapolate completely unstructured qualitative data with much rigor
Said another way - surveys have structure but lack depth, human-led interviews have depth but lack scale = you need something that works for you AND your customers, too.
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Meet franko.ai - https://franko.ai/
Franko is an AI agent that has conversational depth but survey cost and convenience. This helps you talk to 100s of your customers each month, each as short semi-structured topical conversations.
Getting setup takes just a few minutes
1. Add your business context
2. Configure an agent by generating (and reviewing) a "Conversation Plan"
3. Share the link (i.e. in an email sequence like churn or onboard)
4. When customers click, a ChatGPT-type interface opens up and they're guided from there
5. Once done, the transcripts, summaries, details, all appear in your dashboard
Thanks for reading!
Do you have a customer feedback loop built in for your product? Does this solution look like it would be helpful for you?
All comments welcome :)