Agile VC:
My idle thoughts on tech startups
Avoiding the “I’m Here Now What?” Problem
December 14, 2009 · 3 min.
As an investor in internet companies, I have the good fortune of getting to play around with lots of new consumer services. One of the biggest frustrations I sometimes have is when I first start using a product, only to get the feeling of “I’m here, now what?” shortly after engaging.
It’s almost a cliche, but the first time a user tries your product is usually the best opportunity to convert them from a passer-by to a customer (however you might define that within your business model). Even if you’ve mastered some means of gaining consumer exposure to your product (PR, advertising, viral mechanism, word of mouth, etc), if the first time experience doesn’t enable a user to quickly determine A) what the product is and B) why they might want to use it on an ongoing basis, then from a customer acquisition basis you’ve still failed.
To be clear, I think this can be a really hard problem to solve. It’s especially difficult when you’re trying to pioneer a product that’s introducing a new paradigm in user behavior. And engaging the first 50K users is a different challenge than then next 500K or 5M users (i.e. early adopter behavior vs mass mkt). But if you don’t explicitly think about this initial user experience when designing and building your product, you unfortunately might miss out on whatever opportunity you had to create something really exciting.
I’m no product guru but here are a couple of the high level ways I’ve seen companies successfully deal with this problem. I’ve tried to be generic here just to make this widely applicable, at least in theory.
Tightly Control the First-Time User Experience
As a particular user becomes more familiar with a particular product, I’m generally of the belief that consumer web services should give as much control to users as feasible. But I’ve seen companies be very successful at growing and retaining a customer base by actually constraining the first user experience in some way. It might mean limiting certain ancillary functionality, or directing a user through a particular product flow with few/no alternative paths.
Deliver a Nugget of Value Quickly (even small one)
The value of your product or service may accrue primarily over longer periods of time. But if a brand new user can at least realize a small portion of value immediately, it goes without saying they’re more likely to stick around to create / receive the long run value. When we first launched the LinkedIn website in May 2003, the first few thousand users in the door honestly couldn’t do much w/ the product (limited social graph, limited functionality, etc). But we tried lots of tactics to deliver little bits of value like resume-builder type profile creation, ability to browse your connections, statistics on what sorts of people where in your network. Perhaps much of this was simply “novelty” value at the time, but enough folks stuck around that as LinkedIn’s network effects kicked in and functionality expanded, the “utility” value increased significantly.
Be Explicit, Take Nothing for Granted
The people who create new products typically live and breathe them long before they launch, and far more intensely post-launch than any normal consumer does. If you’ve been living this new product non-stop for a long time, it might be “obvious” to you why a new user should use it and what they should do in their first experience. But by not taking anything for granted, explaining things in a simple fashion, and explicitly communicating to a new user what the product does and why they should use it you stand a far better chance of captivating that new user. None of this has to be rocket science… it might be as simple as a 1st time user text / video, a big “Start Here” button, or whatever.
Actually Try Using the Product As Target Consumer Probably Will
This probably means a initial session of 2 mins or less, not 1 hr+. If you’re building a mass mkt product, it means actually working properly in IE not just in Chrome or Safari with lots of fancy browser extensions installed.
Seek to Incorporate New User Feedback
The best consumer-facing companies usually solicit feedback from customers and try to incorporate the most relevant feedback into the design of their products. But a lot of the traditional methods for doing this (feedback forms, forums/communities, user testing) ultimately yield feedback from power users, or people who have something to complain or rave about. Getting feedback from new users requires actively and explicitly seeking it, and choosing to prioritize those product enhancements in addition to the things your most loyal customers might be clamoring for (typically the stuff that gets built more quickly). There’s distributed services like uTest which make doing this a lot easier and cheaper than it was even just a few yrs ago.
There are probably plenty of other approaches… if you have other general purpose ideas or specific product examples in mind, I’d love to hear about them.