founders, product teams, and other operators are constantly reminded to “talk to users”, so I’ve been compiling some favorite hacks we’ve been doing at
@useinari or I’ve seen mentioned online for doing so.
here’s the first 3!
setup direct lines with customers 📲
every time I end a chat with a potential customer, I offer up the option of setting up a slack connect channel between inari and their org.
seems really obvious in hindsight but we’ve been able to get 10x higher volume of feedback, we live troubleshoot problems, and it feels more personal and delightful for customers to have a direct line. added benefit - we link slack channels into
@useinari to automatically push feedback and requests directly into our backlog.
also, it blows my mind how many PMs don’t spend time directly interfacing with customers on social - it’s the easiest way to get a pulse on sentiment, troubleshoot problems, de-risk upcoming launches, and makes building product 10x more fun since you have personal relationships with your users.
i used to spend hours across twitter and discord responding to dm’ing nba top shot users and we caught so many edge cases great ideas directly from the community.
listen to customers with skin in the game 🙉
i love this idea from
@Suhail where he charged $20 to potential customers on venmo to see if customers are willing to put skin in the game for his product and provide higher-quality validation for the idea.
@jeff_weinstein similarly mentions on
@lennysan's podcast that he listens to feedback only from paid customers since payment is one of the best filtering mechanisms for whether the person giving feedback is actually your target customer and not just being a friend.
i really loved jeff’s tip on uncovering even better feature requests by setting a high potential price to charge then pushing the customer to talk through the features needed to justify that high price.
- you: “btw, this thing is 10K.”
- user: “woah, i like this thing but not for $10K… for $10K, it would need to solve X.…”
treat every support ticket as a product exception ❌
i think it’s really cool unique that
@tryramp has their support team report into product.
i totally agree that customer support is a key company function, every CS ticket is a privilege, and each support issue should actually be thought of as a product exception - if the product worked as intended or was more intuitive, the customer wouldn’t have experienced the problem or confusion in the first place!
we’ve setup an internal system so that every support issue is pinged into slack and notion for visibility by the team. these issues are ingested into
@useinari which extracts then clusters the top bugs, product defects, and feature requests from the tickets automatically. then we pick off the backlog of issues and follow-up with customers directly to close the loop.
setting up this system has been insanely helpful for making users feel heard. i'd love to hear more tips if you got any!