Paul Miller from Bethnal Green Ventures shares some of his advice and experience of building product adoption among social apps.
Paul’s Advice: A Summary
- Spend time with your users finding out how technology fits into their lives
- Understand why people will use what you want to build – their reasons could be different to what you think – context and motivations
- Use different methods at different times – start with listening, then show them a Minimum Viable Product, then start to build and get immediate feedback from as many people as possible, then engage with regular users through feedback tools and A/B testing
- Always be talking to your users and customers – be overly friendly, go over the top on customer service and solve their problems
- Make your app inherently collaborative so there is an incentive for users to share it with their friends
- Make it easy to share and make shares look good on social media
- Make it as easy as possible to engage – observe your early users and make changes based on where they have difficulty with your app. Turn them into evangelists.
- Building a tribe or community around your product depends on the scale of user numbers you are aiming for
- Don’t spam people – go through trusted relationships first
- Don’t assume that user interaction with users has to be digital – you’ll get a lot of value from meeting them face to face or on the phone
- Build an architecture that will allow your product to spread to thousands of users
