Customers extrapolate from quality
Early on, we identified the “main page” of our application that most prospective customers would care about when they saw our product. However, there were also the hundred other features and screens that were begrudgingly necessary but no one would think twice about: ways for users to change their email address and password, workflows for customers to create new posts on that main page, workflows to edit existing posts, notification systems to alert subscribers of new posts. We put in the time to build the main thing well, and then we spent at least as much time building the small annoying things.
We use a tool called FullStory that allows us to see how users interact with our site. Every time we sent the demo to a customer, they looked at the “main page” for about 20 seconds. Then they closed the demo. They’d shoot back an email along the lines of, “This looks great! Let’s meet next Tuesday to talk more.”
During later conversations with those prospective customers, we’d discover that they were making the entire purchase decision based on the sliver of the product they saw. They just assumed that the rest existed and was built to the same quality bar.
