Product
From StartupCamp
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Why Should I Use Your Product?
Startup Camp 5: San Francisco, May 4-5, 2008
Session Notes
If you contributed to this discussion, feel free to add your thoughts and notes below.
CindyAlvarez
When you're just trying to get a product out the door, it's hard to take a step back and ensure that your users will understand why they should try you out and will feel comfortable giving you information.
What do consumers expect?
Most users have an internal 'script' of things they subconsciously check out to get a good 'feel' that your application or service is legit. Without those, they may wander off without really even knowing why.
- Explain WHY this will make their life better, simpler, etc.
- If it's free, make that CLEAR up-front.
- If you're asking for user info, have a privacy policy (don't know how to draft one? Look at other sites and borrow liberally. If you're going to use consumer data for anything, you
probably want a lawyer to sign off on it)
- Include contact information (email only is OK)
- Estimate how long signup process will take if it's more than one screen
- Anything involving consumer data or $ needs the https:// URL - consumers have been trained to look for that even if they don't know what it means.
- Registration email helps validate you - it's also a good way to reinforce value prop
- Win-back email for users who registered and haven't visited in 7+ days - gives you a second chance
- Look at the size of your "register now" / value description relative to the rest of the site.
When you're freshly launching, that should be THE most important thing. If your call to action covers less than 25% of your website above-the-fold area, it's not prominent enough.
Other Notes
- If you don't know how to articulate your value prop, grab a couple of friends+family and spend five minutes explaining your service and let THEM come up with a 1-2 sentence description of why they think it's useful. (if they can't come up with anything, you may need to rethink your model!)
- User testing doesn't have to be expensive. You can recruit testers off Craig's List (note: there are Craig's Lists all over the country if you want different demographics) and pay them to go through paper prototypes, HTML click-through static pages, or live apps. $15 is good for online-only feedback; $50-75 is going rate for in-person testing.
- You can buy demographically balanced audiences from Zoomerang (about $6K/100 users I think)
- SurveyMonkey is a great free survey tool. You don't have to pay every single person who takes your survey - you can use the first 1-2 questions to "filter" folks so you only get responses from appropriate audience.
- Most people get less email than you, so don't assume they ignore your registration/winback emails.
- Most people CAN read HTML emails, but images may be turned off by default. Use CSS for most of your email styling.
- Don't have user experience/design folks in your early-stage team? This is a great portfolio project for a young designer - tell them what you need, let them create a page and measure success using Google Analytics. You do have to pay them, but you can probably get a bargain b/c most junior designers don't get that much "ownership" at bigger company contracting gigs. (www.baychi.org, www.ixda.org, www.ok-cancel.com may be able to help you find folks)
Others: Please feel free to add more notes!
For those who attended, thank you so much for your great questions and comments. If you have more questions, you can email me at cindy at cindyalvarez.com. You can also read my blog (Weds and Fri) at www.cindyalvarez.com
