The "secret sauce" is the "golden puzzle": you build up things your competitors can't possibly copy, one piece of awesomeness at the time. Everything is a puzzle piece, from the EULA to each email to customers to the feeling of joy in using the product.
Balsamiq gives out free licenses "like candy": 60+ a day, always to dogooders -- OSS, bloggers, etc. Also gives two away to anyone who wants to do a demo/presentation: one for them, one to give away to someone in the audience. (That is brilliant. Stealing it.)
"There is one way to run a sustainable business based on advertising. Be Google. Or, get bought by them."
Balsamiq on analytics: "I'm a product guy. I don't think I've ever said funnel or conversion before this interview."
"I never intend for it to go beyond 2.0. It should never become bloatware."
"Adding an option to the software is a failure to me as a designer: I'm asking the user to understand why there are two modes and [paraphrase: do the work that I refused to do in identifying the 80% case]."
I thought he should talk to you about increasing conversions.
I understand that it's not his forte, but after hearing your interview, I'm convinced that he'd be inspired by how much conversion optimization could actually improve his product, not just sales.
I did a presentation on this topic a week and change ago in Osaka, actually: Google Analytics makes my eyes glaze over, too, and I get very little valuable out of it. I'll never write customer accessible software again without instrumenting it to within an inch of its life.
For example, the line Peldi said about having to make the hard decisions about which cases are the 80% cases (and should be accommodated by the software) and which are the 20% cases (which add complexity in excess of their value and so should probably not be in the software unless you can handle them invisibly) spoke to me.
However, the more I instrument features I develop, the more I find that I frequently misprioritize, even when listening to customers.
See slides 15 and 16. 15 is the big, ungodly customization dialog from heck. 16 is how much those options actually get used. See way at the bottom where you can change the colors? That was my second most requested feature for three years. I thought it was an eighty percenter -- after all, if customers didn't want it, they'd be asking for something else. Empirically, only about 8 ~ 10% of customers actually touch it.
That isn't classical conversion optimization, but I think even someone whose software is as awesome as Mockups can achieve meaningful results for the business and users by figuring out some goal for their first experience, and then measuring what is getting in the way of customers achieving that goal. (Mockups has a kick-butt first five minutes, by the way. It is probably the best I've ever seen outside of WoW. I think it could be even better, though, by taking the attention to detail they bring to the rest of the business and figuring out to the mouseclick where some people stop believing that Mockups is the most amazing thing they've touched this month.)
Great interview by the way, Andrew. I've read everything Peldi has written in the last couple of years, twice, and I still picked up a trick or three from it. (If there is anybody running an early stage startup here who hasn't read Peldi's technique for contacting bloggers, drop what you're doing and go to his "Startup Marketing Advice" blog post.)
You're too kind Patrick. I have mixed feelings about recording what users do, it feels a bit invasive to me...do people know exactly how much of their behaviour you're recording? Our Desktop app never calls home for that reason. I realize expectations are different when using a web app, but still...I don't know, maybe I'm old fashioned. I'm not saying that you need to listen to customers at all costs, but I find that watching them use the tool (knowing that they are being watched since you're right there or you asked them to run an online usability tool) is a SUPER-valuable way to get info, very often surprising, out-of-left-field, I-never-would-have-tested-for-that info.
Hi guys. We did a rough estimate just for fun the other day (we decided to actually look at analitycs for 5 minutes) and right now we get about $1 for each website visitor, or in other words 1 in 80 buys the tool. We're happy with that rate, and if we had more customers right now, it would probably kill us. As we scale support and the product matures, we'll be looking at optimizing for sure!
I guess what I was saying is that IMHO until you have a good product, doing usability testing is more valuable than thinking about conversions. I see a lot of people overly obsessing over conversions, that's all. :)
Thanks again for the interview Andrew, looking forward to hearing myself tomorrow (boy that will be embarrassing). :)
The "secret sauce" is the "golden puzzle": you build up things your competitors can't possibly copy, one piece of awesomeness at the time. Everything is a puzzle piece, from the EULA to each email to customers to the feeling of joy in using the product.
Balsamiq gives out free licenses "like candy": 60+ a day, always to dogooders -- OSS, bloggers, etc. Also gives two away to anyone who wants to do a demo/presentation: one for them, one to give away to someone in the audience. (That is brilliant. Stealing it.)
"There is one way to run a sustainable business based on advertising. Be Google. Or, get bought by them."
Balsamiq on analytics: "I'm a product guy. I don't think I've ever said funnel or conversion before this interview."
"I never intend for it to go beyond 2.0. It should never become bloatware."
"Adding an option to the software is a failure to me as a designer: I'm asking the user to understand why there are two modes and [paraphrase: do the work that I refused to do in identifying the 80% case]."