What I’ve Learned from My Users After Talking to Them
Hey, this is Morgan, the founder of Gemoo. Every founder clearly knows the importance of knowing your customer, whether you are a retail founder or a SaaS founder. Best founders maintain a direct connection with users, and your users can always provide valuable insights into their needs, preferences, and pain points.
I’ve been trying this for months and got my lessons, so I’d like to share my experience here. I know part of it could sound like a plain mistake that many founders will never make, but sometimes you can’t see the problem because you are in this problem, so I wanna share my story here completely, especially with some new founders like me.
After Gemoo was released in Beta and got some users, I was not satisfied with the amount of feedback I received, I wanted more. My first step was to send emails with a survey attached to all users who signed up for Gemoo to ask for feedback. At that moment I truly believed that if I sent more, I’ll get more feedback. Around 1600 emails were sent but only got 15 replies. Several of them were asking to unsubscribe, and 11 of them filled in the survey. Apparently, it was a fail and drove me to a dead end, I couldn’t get valid and accurate data from only 11 surveys.
Soon I realized that the problem is not about how many you send, but who you send. An accurate target is vital all the time. In my case, not all of those 1600 are active users, most of them might only use it once or twice after sign-up and didn’t use it anymore afterward. So it’s obvious that I can hardly get responses from those silent users, maybe they don’t even remember they’ve used my product before.
