The internet is filled with free-loading bums (mostly Europeans, sorry not sorry) that demand a free trial.
These bums are also not going to be in your niche and their opinion simply does not matter. I looked at his Reddit profile and he just goes around testing a bunch of random AI tools (all free) for fun. So of course they’re not going to out Wraith Scribe, because he doesn’t write.
Every time I reply to these free-loading bums, asking if they actually do serious writing, they don’t respond. Or if they do respond, they show me a blog with 1 post. Hardly serious.
If I gave free trials, I reckon I’ll have tons of users but no uplift in customers.
This hypothesis is to be tested, hence “might do free trial later” in above snippet.
Why do you want feedback? Isn’t it more work?
Making a good product is great marketing, because it lowers your churn, which increases LTV. This in turns gives you more money to develop a better product / spend more to acquire a customer when compared to competitors, etc.
YOU WANT CUSTOMERS, NOT USERS.
In case you don’t know what users are vs customers are:
- Users = people who have signed up to your website. Their opinion doesn’t matter because you don’t know if they actually care about your product.
- Customer = subset of users who actually pay for your product. Their opinion does matter because they whipped out a credit card to pay for your product and so they’re probably in your niche.
Here’s the dilemma though:
Customers expect everything to be perfect and don’t really give feedback.
Or at least that’s what I thought. This is untrue. I tried the below and currently have good customer feedback (good is nonzero for me, which is what it has been for 8 months, so having multiple customer feedback in the same week is a huge win for me—don’t judge me):
New features added based on customer suggestions.
This helps me immensely to reduce churn, long-term because I just fix the issues within 24-48 hours. And if they want new features, I add them ASAP as well.
I want my customers to LOVE my product and feel my product is 10X better than literally everything else out there. Not 2X or 3X, 10X. I want to make my product so fucking good that it’ll make my customers feel stupid if they switch to another platform.
But how did I get them to actually give me feedback, after 8 months of customer churns that never gave me any feedback?
2 things.
1. Pricing
I find that even with current customers, only $39/mo customers are giving me feedback. The $9/mo customers don’t care enough or don’t have enough resonance with the tool to give me feedback. I’ll explain more below on how I’ll try to get $9/mo customers to give me feedback as well.
So charging enough to make it painful for them if the product doesn’t improve is one thing.
Free trials = people will play with your SaaS like a toy and if something doesn’t work, won’t tell you. You’ll need to chase everyone down and maybe 1 out of 50 will give you suggestions. And the suggestions could be useless because they might not be what your avatar wants; they have no skin in the game.
So, don’t just charge people, charge a lot. The more you charge, the more feedback you’ll get. Think about the highest-feedback SaaSes: enterprise products. If you sell a $10K/mo product to a corporation where a team is gonna use your product daily and it interferes with their work if your SaaS has flaws, you’ll get tons of feedback / feature requests every single day.
And if you can’t sell due to your high price, work on your landing page + offer. Don’t lower your price.
2. Keep reminding them.
When a user presses “write” and create an essay, I give ‘em this popup:
Simple thing to reduce churn + increase customer feedback (which reduces churn even further)
Serves 2 purposes:
- Gives them an Instacart-like reminder of how good this software is. Idea is it should hopefully reduce churn if I give them a constant reminder of the main benefit of my AI blog generator. I stole this from idea from Leila Hormozi.
- Constantly reminds the customer report bugs. Prior, when things break, customers don’t tell me (or doesn’t know how to tell me) and they just churn. Now they do.
Doing Even Better In The Future
I want the lower-tiered users to give me feedback too, because they’re in my niche. Thus, I’ll probably change the red text to also include the following:
- Reward users for reporting issues / giving me feature ideas. Tell them I’ll give them 3 articles if they find an issue.
- Give them 10 free articles if they gimme feature ideas or improvements that I end up implementing.
A lower-tier user might not care and just churn if it’s just $9/mo. But everyone loves a good deal, and getting free things is the best deal.
And if the customer’s smart, it’s the best deal in the world in 2 ways:
- I develop whatever they want me to — even if they paid for the highest tier at $499/mo, that’s great deal because most developers that you hire to build features just for you will cost a lot more.
- Not only do they get free development as part of their subscription, I reward them with more articles.
So hopefully the carrot could encourage folks in lower-tiers to give me more feedback.