🧠 How to get more customers (Building 101 #4)
Tags: saas, beginners, webdev, codenewbie
Published: 2023-08-13 00:04:03

Hey all,

Welcome to part 4 of **Building 101** 🎓, this time we’re looking at how you can drive more customers to signup for your products and therefore increase your MRR.

- **Iterating like a startup:** Learn how top startups deliver growth and how you can apply this to your own products

- **Keeping customers engaged:** Engaged customers are more likely to keep purchasing than those left alone

- **Building in public:** Success drives more success - how telling your product’s story can lead to increased growth

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## 1. Iterating like a startup

When most of us decide what to build next, we generally make assumptions based on what we think our customers want. But in reality, this can be very **different to what they actually need.**

The last few decades of VC-backed tech have ushered in a new way of **“validated learning”** that we can all apply when building our own products.


![Build, measure, learn cycle](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/hfmxsxfe6qlk5bxpr6jr.png)

Instead of guessing, we treat our products like science experiments. We continually talk to customers, measure how they use our products and **collect data points that we can learn from** to decide what to build next.

There are generally two main ways you can **start putting this into practice** with your own products:

**Conduct customer surveys**

If customers really love your product, those that get the most value from it will likely be happy to help you improve upon it.

Arrange calls with these customers every few months and ask questions like:

- “What’s the one feature you use every day?” - direct

- “Did you know about feature [X] that we just released?” - direct

- “What’s something you wish the product could do for you?” - indirect

- “Explain to me how you would do [X] using the product.” - indirect

Asking **direct questions gives you instant feedback** on how well your product is communicating its intentions to solve the user’s problems. (It also gives you a free upsell opportunity…😉).

Asking indirect questions helps you continue to gain a **deeper understanding of your customer’s needs** and if the assumptions you are making are in fact correct.

🚨 Spoiler - they’re probably not…

There’s no better feeling than coming away from a user interview with a list of features you know that, if you build, you can add revenue with a snap of your fingers!

> **Hint: **Offer customers an Amazon gift card for participating in your surveys. This just gets them on a call - once they’re on, they are yours to experiment with…

**Use product analytics tools**

User interviews are great, but we still need to understand how the other 90% of our customers use our products - otherwise, we’re flying blind!

With every change we make, we should also **release analytics features** that are designed precisely to give us instant feedback on how users are getting along with it.

The best solution for newcomers to product analytics is **MixPanel**. But in general, for any analytics tool, the approach will be:

1. **Integrate the platform’s SDK** into your product’s code.
2. Write code to **trigger events** when users visit specific pages or click certain buttons that you consider meaningful.
3. Include **customer attribution data** in your tracking events.
4. Use the platform’s analytics tools to **track customer behaviour** over time.

Regularly review the data you’re collecting and see if the features you worked so hard on are being used to their full potential.

Being data-driven in your decision-making is the best way to build things customers will actually pay for over the long run.

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## 2. Keeping customers engaged

Keeping customers engaged with your product from the moment they sign up is not only key to preventing them from backing out soon after (or **‘churning’**) but also to **improving conversion rates** when it comes to upsells and add-ons you offer.

Here’s 3 things you can do to increase engagement:

**Communicate with your customers**

Outside of your product, the best way to achieve this is to **start a newsletter**. You already have your customer’s email addresses, so tell them about all the cool things you are doing!

For every product update, send out the following emails:

- **“Here’s what’s coming soon…”** (pre-release)
_Include high-quality screenshots and short-form demo videos alongside a limited-time promotional event for early adopters._

- **“It’s live…”** (immediate post-release)
_This lets customers that didn’t convert know that they missed out._

- **“It’s not too late…”** (one week later)
_If your changes were successfully adopted by some of your users, share the analytics you collected and give those that missed out a second chance to convert._

> **Tip:** You can also host yearly online customer conferences where you discuss all the improvements coming in the next year and when customers will be able to get their hands on them.

**Start applying gamification**

There are also strategies you can apply **inside your product** to increase engagement on a daily basis.

I always refer to **Todoist Karma** as the best example of this. At a high-level Todoist is a task tracking tool and ‘Karma’ is a points-based system the platform uses to incentivise users to keep creating and completing tasks.


![Todoist Karma](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/n0k5y3wkyo32ib93skqu.PNG)

In reality, **this can be applied to any product**. You decide for yourself what you want your users to optimise, whether that is ‘do more’ of something or ‘minimise’ a statistic relevant to them. Then **incentivise** them to do so.

It plays right into the wheelhouse of Todoist as their free plan is limited to 5 projects, so incentivising users to create more projects pushes them into a position where they feel they need to upgrade.

**Leverage product psychology**

The more customers **feel like** they can see your product evolving, the more you’re convincing them that they are buying into a platform that **continues to work for them.**

By including a button to manually update to the latest version of their app, Todoist again keeps customers engaged and communicates that the team is **constantly at work** improving the product for them.


![Todoist product updates](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/6w01smdkq2yeqev0fnf0.PNG)

This is again **a strategy all of us can add to our products** with minimal effort (even if the button doesn’t do anything for now other than just refresh the page! 😉).

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## 3. Building in public

Driven by modern media, there is a growing trend among almost all creative sectors that creating content **documenting your journey** striving towards a goal can make the effort all the more worth the while when you eventually get there.

For us builders, creating content as we build out our products is a great way for us to get the word to the wider building community, and our customers.

Here are some of the best places to do that in the tech space:

**Twitter**

Examples like the one below are rife in the **#buildinpublic** community - not only does this create hype for your product, but as you can see an established account can **use Twitter as a top growth tool:**

{% embed https://twitter.com/remotejoeclark/status/1602174486610169857?s=20 %}

**Reddit**

We all know the **action is in the comments** so leverage these niche communities to drive traffic to your own products.

Ask Redditors to roast your landing pages and **post status updates asking for feedback.**

But also post useful discussions in targeted niches **where your customers are likely to hang out** to try to find some more users. **GummySearch** is awesome for researching niche subreddits.

Take a look at this post on Reddit [(link)](https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/15kq6n9/ive_challenged_myself_to_make_100k_in_100_days/) that, while not entirely related to tech, generated 90 upvotes and 23 comments whilst getting to the top of r/Entrepeneur:


![Building in public on Reddit](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/ary2s7vj0gxij3szyqat.png)

**Blogging**

If socials aren’t for you, you could post on IndieHackers or **Dev.to** and start writing about your product journey.

Doing this for a while will naturally **improve your SEO** and provide all the content you need to send those all-important product updates to your customers!

While getting started creating content can seem hard going at first, **it pays off in the long run** - the sooner you get started the sooner that day will come.

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## Round up

That's it! Hopefully the discussions I've gone through can help you when looking to grow your customer base for you next product.

If you enjoyed this post, **let me know in the comments!**

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