If an app does too little then it isn’t be worth the cost of installation, or registration let alone the actual purchase price. Similarly if it does do too much, then it will clash with some other pre-existing software or workflow that users are already happy with. It’s a Goldilocks problem, you need to find the product that’s just right.

Example: Time tracking

At an absolute minimum time tracking is just totaling a list of numbers. Now, if that was all a web app had to offer, it would be useless. Excel or Google docs does that job already. It’s at this point we realise simplicity is overrated. No amount of web fonts, HTML5 transitions, or sound effects can help a product that simply isn’t earning its keep.

At a maximum, time tracking can involve project management, budgets, contractors, invoicing, receipt tracking and employee monitoring. Applications that incorporate so many surrounding tasks tread on the toes of products already in place, in this case, Xero, Ballpark, Basecamp, etc.

Products exist to solve problems that occur in a workflow. They have a start and end point within that workflow. To understand where these points should be, you must understand the entire workflow. Let’s look at the workflow for a team ordering lunch every day…

If you’re building an app that helps teams order lunch every day, the workflow might look like this…

1. Someone gets hungry.
2. He or she communicates this to the rest of the team.
3. Debate ensures about whether to go out or order in.
4. Second debate about where to order in from.
5. Menus for different places are passed around.
6. A decision is arrived at quickly
7. One person is appointed to gather everyone’s orders.
8. That person then places order.
9. That person communicates delivery time & cost to everyone
10. Time passes.
11. Food arrives, and is eaten.
12. Orderer checks if everyone paid enough & who still owes money.
13. Finances are settled, or the settlement is postponed until tomorrow.
14. Some will talk about the food on Twitter or Facebook. Some will post pictures on Instagram. Others will review on Yelp.
15. Everyone returns to work.

When you understand the full workflow, you can focus on the most concise painful subset your product solves, or alternatively the piece you can make more fun or interesting. Don Dodge has a great article titled “Is your product a vitamin or a painkiller” that discusses the difference here.

Where should you start?

Start your product at the first step where you can add value. For our lunch example, this is probably step four. Starting any earlier would mean taking on chat products or email, rarely a good idea. (Side-note: Unstructured communication always falls back to email or chat. You can count on no fingers the amount of products who have changed this over the years.)

A real world example would be TripIt. TripIt solves travel management. Their app could start with flight search, but TripIt couldn’t add value there. The first point they can add value is right after a booking is made. By understanding the entire workflow, Tripit designed a great solution. The last thing that happens before TripIt can add value is “User opens booking confirmation”. This is the first point TripIt can add value, so they start with that email and import from there. Similarly, Instragram starts with importing your social network, or time tracking can start by importing projects from Basecamp. Good APIs and import features help your users get off to an easy running start.

Where should you stop?

Your budget, whether time or money, should restrict but never define your scope. A large budget should define how well a problem is solved, never how many problems are tackled. Attempting to tackle an entire workflow from start to finish for all types of users is near impossible.

Your product should stop when the next step…

• has well defined market leaders looking after it (e.g. PayPal, IMDB, Expedia), and you don’t intend to compete.
• is done in lots of different ways by lots of different types of users (e.g. trying to process salaries in a time tracking app would be tricky)
• involves different end-users than the previous steps (e.g. managers, accountants etc.)
• is an area you can’t deliver any value.

Identify and Eliminate Meaningless Steps

If a user is finished with your app and their next step is to download a file so that it can be emailed elsewhere, that’s a meaningless step. If it’s to export their expenses to CSV so that that file can be downloaded and re-saved as XLS then mailed to their accountant, that’s a meaningless step. If completing a project then means downloading all the files, zipping them and emailing them to the client for safe keeping, that’s a meaningless step. Emails are almost always a source of meaningless steps, in that they rarely carry enough information (“Someone posted a comment”), or they don’t link up the obvious actions (confirm, mark as resolved etc).

In general any time your user is clicking through a defined series of steps, adding no insight and making no decisions along the way, it’s a sign there are steps to be killed.

Future Iterations

Always fill in the gaps before expand the product. The shift from shrink-wrapped to subscription software rewards products that reliable and complete, not buggy & bloated. Expanding your product to solve a larger problem can work wonders, but can only be done on a solid foundation. If your fundamental product isn’t holistic, then adding more features only makes things worse.

So much is written about the pursuit of simplicity these days but often there is a confusion.There is a fundamental difference between making a product simple, and making a simple product.

Making a product simple emphasizes removing all unnecessary complexity so that every users can solve their problems as efficiently as possible. Making a simple product, however, is about scoping down and choosing the smallest subset of the workflow where your product delivers value. This MVP approach runs the risk of being labelled a point solution, or worse,
‘a feature but not a product‘.

When shooting for a “simple product”, be careful where you draw the line.

Unlike page views, visitors, returning visitors, and conversions, there’s also no analytics app that can instantly tell you what you need to know. But ignore engagement at your peril.

Google+ claims 170,000,000 users, which gets them a few news stories, but ignores a very real problem. Almost none of their users are engaged. They’re just people who clicked a link titled “Ok” when faced with Google+. It’s similar to newspapers goosing up their page views using hacks like slideshows. At some point you have to wonder who you’re really fooling.

Why is engagement important?

Most customers who sign up will use a product only once. This is true for every product with a free trial. This isn’t surprising; it’s the fallacy of funnels in action. When you strip every barrier away from signing up, what you get is lots of sign-ups. Unfortunately lots of sign-ups doesn’t translate to lots of customers. Customers are the result of a series of events. Here is a simple overview:

Engagement is just one piece of the puzzle, but it is so frequently ignored that there’s lots of quick wins to be had. Here’s 4 ways to increase user engagement.

1. Make a Strong First Impression

Every day a potential customer is seeing your interface for the very first time. This can be forgotten within teams that are always designing for themselves. The first screen your users see has 3 important jobs…

1. Explain how your application works.
2. Motivate your users to get started.
3. Let your users know how to get help, if and when they need it.

Web applications that do none of the above get the exact behaviour that they designed for. The users will log out and most likely never return.

There are lots of great ways to welcome a user to your app and show them around. There are blank slates, tutorials, dummy data, etc. A good first step that we encourage Intercom customers to do is to post a welcome message to greet each new sign up personally. This works great for starting conversations, which in turn increases conversions.

Always Show a Welcome Message

In Intercom we show the above welcome message to users after they sign up. It is a personal note explaining that we are always available to help. This single message is responsible for over 400 conversations that simply wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Some people just write thanks, and we reply. Some ask how to set up a welcome message, and we reply. Some ask questions, and spot bugs and, again, we reply.

Simply communicating with your users is a great way to encourage them to ask questions, try out features, and stick around. By starting a dialogue they’re far more likely to say things like “How can I do email inactive users” or “How should I use tags?“.

At best you’ll win yourself more customers, and at worst you learn what’s missing or misunderstood in your application.

2. Gradually expose the depth of your product

Every worthwhile application has features that aren’t immediately apparent or useful. These can include quick-wins such as email notifications and alerts, third-party integrations, export features, and even small optimisations like keyboard shortcuts.

These deeper benefits can’t be called out immediately. After all, who cares about data export before they have data, or keyboard shortcuts before they’ve used any features?

Most product owners tend to try to expose these features either through badly timed email blasts, documentation, or an FAQ. None of these approaches work well.

Emails arrive out of context, out of time, and are more likely to interrupt a user than to interest them. Their response is to archive your and stop reading future emails.

Leaving features explained and promoted in your FAQ or help sections means their only chance of exposure is when a user has experienced an issue with a part of your product. This isn’t the ideal time to distract them with other features.

Define a Message Schedule

We advise our customers to create message schedules to gradually promote certain features. When you have good insight into your userbase you can work out which secondary features delight users and at what point they’re useful. Once you’ve done that it’s just a matter of timely communication. Intercom lets you stagger messages over a series of sessions. This means each time a user logs in you’re showing them more and more reasons to stick around.

Here’s an example engagement routine from one of our customers:

Always end each message by letting your customers know that you’re there to help if they have any questions. This is key to getting feedback, which helps you tweak your engagement routine.

3. Announce features and improvements in-app

Users don’t notice when your product development slows down. They’re logging in to use your product, not monitor your development progress. However, if things go quiet for long enough, they’ll be easily distracted when a competitor releases a new feature, whether valuable or frivolous.

The only time your users care about features or improvements is in your application, so that’s exactly where you should be announcing them.

Anecdotally, we see a 10x increase in communications (as do our customers) from in-app messages over email announcements, and there are other, softer, benefits too. For example when we announced the map and gallery features in Intercom, our users clicked straight through, were immediately impressed and started tweeting screenshots. I can’t imagine an email achieving a similar effect.

4. Talk with customers during trials

Startups tend to fall into two categories: those that solve a problem people experience, and those that are nice to have or fun to use. Don Doge famously labeled the two categories as vitamins and painkillers. If your product is a painkiller, then you can learn lots from your trial users.

There are two types of users in your 30-day trial. There are tyre-kicker who might sign up after seeing some praise on Twitter or a link on Hacker News. They don’t have your problem, and are only here to have a quick look around at the solution you’ve created. These guys aren’t prospects, and will rarely have valuable feedback for you. Never listen to theoretical customers.

1. What makes them sign up? – This is usually your best approach to increase engagement and conversions. Every worthwhile app has some killer attributes or features that push users over the line and have them reaching for their credit card. Attributes can be things like speed, security, or compatibility. Features are usually specific things your product does that customers value.
2. What makes them leave? – What did they expect your product to do that it fails to do? This is useful product and marketing feedback. Either your marketing should be more targeted (e.g. imagine a professional photographer signing up for Instagram to sell their photos), or your product genuinely is missing features for a group of your prospects.

Starting these conversations with trial users is educational but also gives you an chance to address issues, let users know that their feature is weeks away, or persuade them to try your alternative approach. For many users, your app will hopefully be good enough to sell itself, but there’ll always be trial users who just have a few questions before committing. You have to be there for them. After all, even Porsche and Ferrari garages hire salesmen.

Start Increasing Engagement

We’ve seen first hand the effect of these four simple steps towards engaging with your customers. Each takes no more than an hour and pays back many times over. What other tips and techniques have you seen? Let us know in the comments.

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You're reading Ways to Increase User Engagement, a post from the Intercom Blog.
Intercom is a powerful CRM and messaging tool for web app owners.

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By applying the Gestalt principles to your components, you can quickly prepare concepts. The whole point of working at this fidelity is the speed at which you can explore ideas with a reasonable degree of precision. Over the years I’ve learned some useful ways to keep things fast, useful and timely. I’m loathe to write a “7 top tips for wireframing” but when working with less experienced designers I find the following themes occur frequently…

1. Everything means something

Every colour, every line, every shadow, every gradient. If your atomic unit of wireframes is a rectangle, with solid lines, a colored background and a drop shadow you’re communicating a lot, whether you intended to or not. These artefacts can be carried through to design, without anyone ever thinking why they make senes. Everything has to mean something.

2. Consistency Helps

One nice thing about sketching, is that it defaults to same colour and font everywhere (i.e. you have to swap markers or change your handwriting for a difference). A frequent issue I see with wireframes is numerous different shades of a colour, or line weights, or font faces, all included without thought. This makes the wireframe more confusing to understand, as I wonder “Did he deliberately change font here? Is that label bigger because it’s more important?” etc. To avoid this, I encourage students to use a limited color set (3-5 grays), 2 fonts, default HTML components, and little else. This might result in “dull” wireframes, but bear in mind all wireframes end up in the trash anyway. They’re not what counts, you’re not delivering a PDF for visitors to “ooh” and “aah” at, you’re desigining software for people to use. A sexy wireframe is a waste of everyones time in the project.

A second point worth noting here is where you lay your baseline. Starting with black text, means you can only get bigger and bolder, resulting in a Deep Purple style wireframe with everything louder than everything else. Starting with gray text, allows you to go darker and lighter. As Ryan Singer said, in a moment of Linguistic Relativity, HTML doesn’t offer a <weak> tag, but maybe it needs one.

3. Speed and Exploration

The purpose of low fidelity design, is not to polish and refine, but to explore the solution space. Initially it often appears there are many solutions to a design challenge. Only by exploring a few of them, and laying them out in front of you can you decide which will work best. Cennyd Bowles describes how chess players face a similar challenge. Early in the game there are a lot of choices. Some you can rule out by instinct or experience. The remainder you mentally explore to see how they play. Naïve designers will fall in love with their first idea and cling to it for dear life. Andy Rutledge describes this phenomena an Lord Of the Rings inspired essay title My Precious.

If you can’t produce concepts quickly, then you’re working at the wrong fidelity. If your wire-framing serves only to deliver a grayscale version of what you’ve already decided you’re building then you’re wasting everyones time.

4. Real Copy, Real Data

The biggest mistakes I’ve seen made in projects (including my own) comes from the designers not seeing real content up front. If you’re including a photo gallery, you have to see the photos before you can decide whether to include it, make it a primary feature or fight against it. Similarly If you’re designing a data driven dashboard, you need to know the data looks like. Dummy data leads you into a world where headings never wrap, text can justify without looking absurd, photo dimensions and orientations are always convenient, and numbers always fit in their little boxes. The path to UI hell is sign posted “Lorem Ipsum”.

5. Know your technology

A great design can be a terrible solution. If your design includes custom HTML components, novelty size buttons and dropdowns and ajax powered live search, it’s worth remembering that every project has a budget. If you know HTML/CSS/JS, which you should, and you’ve seen what it takes to test a page on IE6/7/8/9 Safari, Chrome and Firefox, you’ll think twice about what wizardry you’ll put in your wireframes. It might just a little component, and it might even be already available in jQuery UI, but remember, there are no small changes. I’m not saying that you should never include advanced interactions in wireframes, I’m saying you need to know the cost of what you’re doing. For Hipmunk it’s worth investing weeks, even months of work into the best possible calendar picker, as it’s the guts of the interaction. In that case the trade-off is worth it. It’s when I see a fancy date picker for date of birth, or a very precise Javascript powered time picker that I think the designer should first talk to the developer.

6. Whatever Works

The goal is great delivery, not great deliverables. No one marvels at great deliverables except other UX designers, and even then they’re only interested when the end result was solid. If you’ve sketched something on a whiteboard that you’re confident is a good feasible solution, that has real data in it and everyone in the project knows what precisely what you mean then there is zero value in re-creating your whiteboard as a wireframe. Don’t be a slave to deliverables.

Other resources

These are lessons learned both through personal trial and error, and also from lecturing and seeing the materials that students present. Here’s a short list of excellent posts about wireframing, sketching and designing.

• Gestalt Principles – Andy Rutledge wrote a great series on the basics of design. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
• Good design faster – Leah Buley has had this as her mantra for years now. Here’s a slidedeck and a podcast where she explains it.
• Sketching User Experiences – Bill Buxton wrote an excellent book a couple of years ago, that covers some of the topics here. It’s a great read, and not just for designers.

This data is easy to come by in any well built application, and offers invaluable insights into how users value your application, what features they use, and what will encourage them to pay. You can get this data in many different ways, this post focuses on how Intercom offers quick insights to answer common questions.

1. Insights into User Activity

Here are some questions you should be able to answer about your product within seconds…

• What percentage of our userbase have been active in the past day, week, or month?
• What amount of sign-ups from 3 months ago are still active this month, and who are they?
• Who is online right now?
• Who was online in the last few days?

These are not vanity metrics. Knowing if your product has value that keeps your customers coming back is vital, especially if your business model depends on long-term customers. Braden’s article about the difference between discoverable value and immediate value is a fantastic guide to understanding how you should position your product and get people using it.

Additionally, knowing who is affected by live bugs or poor responsiveness allows you to follow up and apologize to them specifically. You never want to tell your entire userbase about something that affected a small percentage, so being able to identify who used your product when is crucial.

Intercom and User Activity

A basic install of Intercom logs user activity leaving you able to answer the above questions by applying filters to your list of users. Many of our customers create Auto Tags to easily identify customers at risk (last seen > 30 days) and long term customers (signed up > 365 days).

2. Insights into Product Usage

These are the types questions every every UX designer and product manager should be able to answer quickly while making product and design decisions:

• How many users haven’t uploaded an avatar?
• Which users have installed the iPhone app?
• How many reports have been created since we launched the reporting feature?
• How many users have created more than 5 projects?

Obviously the nature of the question will vary from domain to domain, but if you can’t quickly answer usage questions as a designer, you’re fighting one-handed. Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Re-designing a feature because no one used it is the ultimate self-delusion.

When no one uses a feature it can be because it was either missed, misunderstood, or miserable. A redesign can only solve the last of these, and even then only in some circumstances.

Intercom & Product Usage

Customers who send usage data to Intercom can instantly see the effects and uptake of new features as they are rolled out. For example, if you launch a new feature, or roll out a new onboarding process, you’ll quickly see if it’s achieving the desired effects; i.e. are there more photos uploaded or reports generated etc.

3. Insights into Revenue & Conversions

Here are some questions a product owner must know to work out everything from pricing through to feature promotions.

• What are some good indications a user will convert?
• Looking only at users on the day they convert, what do they have in common?
• What’s the best indicator that a paying user is drifting away and may quit?
• What percentage of last year’s premium customers are still active today?
• What percentage of last year’s free customers are still active today?
• Is freemium working for us?

A great indication of what your customers value is what features they’ve used most when they convert into a paying customer. A good app owner has a great understanding of what key features customers value. This previous post helps identify quick wins and what’s good to focus on for your product.

How does Intercom help?

By sending information about either price plans, or lifetime value of customers to Intercom you can ask quickly answer important questions such as “What do all premium users have in common when they convert?” or “How many of our customers are on the wrong plan?”. Again Auto Tags help you easily identify segments that matter such as premium active users, active trialists etc.

Insights lead to actions

When you study data and context you get evidence. Evidence combined with experience leads to insights. Insights should be actionable. This is what separates the questions above from vanity metrics.

So much product design is misguided due to the availability heuristic. People are disproportionately influenced by the data that’s easiest to get, which is often page views, sign-ups, tweets, etc. It’s important to come up with, ask, and answer hard questions about your application and the assumptions that you’re making. If you build a new feature that everyone is asking for you, who is actually using it, how often, and are they more likely to start paying you more money?

There is no guaranteed correlation between lines of code added to your app and value created. There is, however, a goldmine of insights sitting in your database waiting to be discovered. This is the information that helps you identify and add value to your product.

Which is what it’s all about, right?

Today, we launched that screen.

You need to know your users

Customer development, pro-active engagement, price testing, and surveys all work best when you have a good understanding of your customer. A single data-point or price-plan isn’t enough. The key questions include:

• Who is this? – A VP in IBM, or a student in Bristol?
• Have they been using the app lately? Have they seen our latest announcements?
• How often do they use it?
• What sort of user are they?
• Has anyone spoken with them recently?
• What was the conclusion of the last discussion?

You can group customer information loosely into four categories: profile data, business data, activity data, and communication data. If you don’t have all four, you’ll always be in a weak position. You will end up wasting time in lengthy support discussions with students on your free plan who will simply never pay, or sending marketing mails to customers who haven’t logged in in months, or seeing that a CEO or very influential person has signed up and hasn’t received any attention whatsoever. None of this is desirable and all of this is preventable. You simply need to stop thinking in silos.

Thinking In Silos

When your customer information is scattered across different data stores, it encourages thinking in silos. You put on your marketing hat and blast out marketing emails, the support team are busy closing support tickets, and someone else is busy calculating your AARRR numbers.

The thing is all of this data is connected. Sending marketing messages to someone with 3 open and unanswered tickets will cost you a customer, resulting in 1 less daily active user. It’s all connected. Siloed data costs you your customers, and leaves you clueless as to why you’re losing them.

Customer Data is Multiplicative

Getting related data together pays off disproportionately well. In the same way a good dashboard can save hours by merging data sources (letting you see commonalities), a good customer profile paints the perfect picture of a customer, letting you know everything you need to know. As our user profile screen is one of the key screens in Intercom, it has been through many iterations. Here’s what’s we’re launching today.

But I already have that data?

Sure you do. You can grep your log files, query your database, search Google and skim through your support app, and then your emails. You can do this for every customer you want to talk to, but you don’t. Not because it’s not important, but because it’s simply too time-consuming. Obstacles upstream propagate downstream. Because you don’t have time to do this, you can’t communicate well. Because you can’t communicate well, you do it badly, if you do it at all.

Simplicity Causes Butterfly effects

What we’re doing in Intercom is making this process of researching and communicating easier, by an order of magnitude. When you achieve this level of reduction in time or complexity you make new ideas possible. When it takes just a few clicks to ask all active premium users how to improve your reporting (while they’re on the reporting screen), then that changes things. Easy access to instant targeted in-context feedback takes a lot of guesswork out of the equation. It changes how you design.

As Bill Buxton noted at UX London this year, the remote control changed the television industry. Removing the effort of changing channels caused the networks to have to synchronise advertising or lose their viewers. Of course people could change channels long before remote controls, but it just wasn’t easy enough to do regularly.

Why is this so important?

Good customer data supports good proactive communication. We have long believed that targeted timely communications are the path to loyal happy customers. Unless you have everything you need to know at your fingertips, you’re not in the right position to communicate.

Don’t confuse proactive communication with customer support. Good customer support involves reacting well to problems as they occur. The thing is, most customers don’t report problems. Instead they just shrug their shoulders and assume that you already know about that bug, or don’t have that feature, or don’t really care if they’re jumping ship. Your support tickets only represent a fraction of what’s actually going wrong for your customers. To find the rest you need to actively reach out to them.

You need to get to know them.

Intercom is growing at an amazing rate. We now have thousands of customers, and we want to deliver an excellent customer experience to every single one of them. Previously we have shared support responsibilities amongst the team, but the time has come to hire someone who will own this responsibility.

Role

You will be the first point of contact for all customer enquiries. You will be responsible for dealing with all feedback and questions, performing triage of any technical issues, and reporting to the product team to ensure we continue to learn from our customer feedback. In addition, you will proactively identify and talk to new sign-ups to ensure they are getting the most out of the product.

Requirements

• You will be able to demonstrate a strong understanding of web technologies
• Previous experience with Javascript is necessary (to help users install Intercom in their applications)
• Previous experience with ruby (and rails) is desirable, even if all you have done is done some tutorials and built basic apps
• You will have a computer science / software engineering background (or be able to demonstrate an equivalent)
• You will be working from our Dublin office
• You will have excellent written and spoken English for communicating with our customers

Opportunity

Join a very exciting & internationally relevant start-up building a web product aiming to change the nature of the how business is done online
Work with a small but incredibly talented team using modern web technologies
An opportunity to transition to our product team after 12 – 18 months, assuming sufficient progress has been made

For this role, we will consider candidates without prior commercial experience.

How to apply

Send an email to ciaran@intercom.io – Include a resume, and links to any projects (personal or commercial) that you’ve worked on.

Today we launched automated emails in Intercom. A feature that evokes the old Spider-Man quote: “With great power comes great responsibility”.

The feature lets Intercom customers automatically email their users as they meet certain criteria. For example: “Automatically email users after 7 days if they haven’t added a teammate or created a project” or you can promote a particular aspect with a mail like “On day 15 tell all iPhone users about the iPhone app, if they haven’t already installed it”.

If you run or work with web applications you can quickly see how this feature is powerful for increasing engagement, providing great customer experiences, and helping with retention issues. But you have to show your customers respect for their time and attention.

Respect your customers

Despite terms like “Drip feed Marketing”, “Lifecycle Marketing”, and “Automated Marketing” gaining massive traction lately, we’ve been hesitant to label this feature along these lines as they are all features that ignore the new nature of online business. They relegate customers to mere data points who are to be hammered with emails based on their every action, as we can see in the screenshot above. We don’t believe in it.

This type of interruptive marketing ignores how online business is changing. It’s disrespectful, and is based on poor assumptions. For example, automatically emailing everyone to “remind them to log in” is a the result of a self-deluded mind. A more appropriate question would be “Why has this customer not logged in 30 days?”. It’s unlikely they thought the product was great and simply forgot about it. Solve that problem first.

The hidden cost of broadcasts

Every communication sent costs social currency. Every irrelevant or inappropriate email adds data to a user’s internal inbox filter. This is why open rates are so painfully low. You can A/B test subject lines all day long, but if your users have already decided your emails are nonsense then neither A or B is gonna change their mind. If you’re not being filtered by a rule, you’re being filtered by a mindset.

Not everything that counts can be counted

When MailChimp tells me that I can email 10,000 Intercom users for $100, that sounds like a good price. We can measure ROI on that. But if I do email 10,000 users about something they don’t care about, it’s really hard to measure the damage that does. I can count unsubscribes and cancellations, but that’s never the true cost.

The true cost, in simple terms, is this: The more you shout at someone, the less they listen to you. This applies well beyond running web applications. Interruption and broadcast marketing are dying, remnants of a customer-hostile era of business.

Writing effective emails

There are times when it makes perfect sense to interrupt your customers—that is what you’re doing, don’t forget. Big announcements, important timely news, imminent actions—all of these things are worth interrupting a customer for as they probably want to or need to know about them.

Emails must be well targeted

Writing to all your customers at once heavily limits what you can accurately say. Inevitably your message and tone degrades into a bland one-size-fits-none mess full of ifs mights and maybes. You have many different types of customers who vary on price plan, activity, team size, how long they’ve been with you, how feel about your product and many other variables. Breaking down your message by the most appropriate variable massively improves the impact.

As an example, if you wanted to tell your users about your iPhone app, you could dump a message out to everyone. That’s the zero points, old style way of doing it. Not everyone has an iPhone, some already have your app installed, some have barely used your web app let alone installing your iPhone app. Targeting isn’t difficult when you have the right tools available. Here’s what it’d look like in Intercom.

In 30 seconds you’re now emailing the exact people who want your iPhone app, that is, those who have an iPhone, haven’t installed your app and signed up a week ago. You can easily improve this with further filters if you have better data.

Emails should arrive at the right time

Emailing your users based on actions they perform in your application, while they’re in your application, is silly and looks meaningless, but this is often the approach by auto-mailers. Similarly sending daily summaries outside of working hours, or on weekends is often badly targeted. With more than 40% of emails being received on mobile devices, users are now getting mails as they arrive, whether they’re on a golf course, in a nightclub, or on driving home. Don’t be surprised that click through rates are so low.

Emails must be personal

No one likes speaking to “support” or “accounts”. People talk to people. Such labels dehumanize conversations and let customers feel justified in blowing up at a company. After all, who is “accounts”? They certainly don’t have emotions. Any communication with a case number or a “No Reply” policy doesn’t feel like a conversation, and because of that it’s likely to get ignored. We’ve tried to tackle this in Intercom by including some extras in each email.

By include a photo and full name in each email, we have seen much more meaningful conversations take place. People are wowed to see the actual person behind the application. They’re more forgiving, caring, thoughtful, helpful, and loyal. It works.

Invest in your communications

All the available data says that the impact of email is dying. While the top e-commerce sites are now sending an average of 177 mails to their customers each year, open rates are plunging, along with click through rates and response rates. This supports what we’ve seen in similar studies comparing emails against in-app messaging. People are tuning out to bad emails, so we need to stop sending them.

Regardless of the tool you use for automated mails, take care to message the right users at the right time, in a personal manner. It’s the only way to show your customers you care. After all, as Ken Hammer noted, you wouldn’t write a passionate love letter only to address it “To Whom It May Concern”.

A closed beta is an excellent feedback loop. It lets you see what works well in your application, and it helps you understand the jobs your customers are trying to do. However—like any system—if you put garbage in, you get garbage out. Your beta users and their feedback are massively influential, so picking users at random isn’t wise, as it can lead to a one-size-fits-none product.

Beta users must be focused

Your beta users must be a focused group of potential customers experiencing the same problem, or the same set of problems. If this isn’t the case then inevitably one of two things will happen:

• Unhappy customers: You only pay attention to feedback from certain customers, meaning your product will get mixed reviews. A large number of your beta customers use your product for the wrong reasons, and they’ll feel like you’re ignoring their requests.
• One-size-fits-none: You attempt to keep everyone happy and build the sum of all total features. A collection of under-developed features to meet the idle daydreams of a user base. A Swiss Army knife.

Beta users will guide you toward an MVP

As you map out all of the areas that could benefit from further iterations (spoiler: usually all of them), you’ll realize you need guidance on where to focus. This is where beta users come in. If your possible features are a map then your users are your compass. Best make sure they’re all pointing the same direction.

But they won’t tell you when you’re done

Early adopters desire the new functionality you claim to provide. They are willing to accept instability, poor usability, limited integrations and other faults just to gain this new technology.

Their tolerance and enthusiasm is a double-edged sword. New—but incomplete—features will be welcomed with open arms, always. The nature of early adopters means they’ll never press you for polish or finesse, and will always be excited by new features regardless of the state.

In my experience, there are only two ways you leave beta.

Exit via scope: a defined feature set

At some point in beta you decide “We’re launching with these 3 features”, or in Jobs To Be Done speak, “Users should hire our product to do the following three jobs”. Along with a closed scope, you should maintain a quality level. For some apps that might be “stunning visual design on all screens”, for other apps it could be simply “clear and usable”. Ryan Singer has good advice on maintaining a good user experience while searching for an MVP.

Exit via time: an unmissable deadline

Events such as SXSW, Demo Day, Disrupt, etc. provide start-ups with a compelling event. If they have a live, open, web application they can capitalize on the traffic they will draw. If they fail, they will receive thousands of visitors, most of whom leave, often never to return (see Here’s what you should know about private betas). There is a danger here of shipping junk on time. Deadlines you can’t afford to miss can leave you with products you can’t afford to ship.

What about exit via budget? This is like testing out a car’s brakes by speeding towards a wall. Design and development continue well after launch, not to mention new costs such as advertising, support, etc.

Launching your product because you’re almost out of money isn’t a strategy, it’s a death knell. You don’t want to hear it.

Naming a product is difficult. Branding legend Marty Neumeier says that good product names have 7 characteristics. They should be distinctive, short, appropriate, easy to spell and pronounce, likable, extendable, and protectable. Looking through this list of Android names, it’s clear that many marketing teams disagree with Marty.

Here’s a simple rule: if your product isn’t a condom then don’t name it like one. What am I talking about? Let’s take a look…

Which will run out first: the list of “sexy sounding product names”, or the list of meaningfully different ways to differentiate Android phones?

I know where my money lies.

Read more

• To Sustain or Disrupt – What’s happening with Microsoft & Apple
• The Fallacy of Funnels – How not to think about your users
• We’re hiring – Intercom is hiring a lead visual designer

The total market for coffee in America is worth about eighteen billion dollars. That’s $18,000,000,000 if you like to see zeroes. If you’re opening up a coffee shop in SOMA, is this figure relevant to you?

Of course not. Because while all coffee sold in any form to anyone in America is indeed an eighteen billion dollar market, that’s not the market you’re entering. Your concern is your total addressable market. To put it simply, if you converted every single customer within your reach, how much would you make?

This is a much trickier question to answer, but it’s the only one that matters. What customers are within your reach?

Understanding markets

Misunderstanding what your actual market is causes what is known as the Chinese Glove Problem. When you tell someone you’re going to go after the Chinese market, you can back it up by saying that even if you only get 0.1% of the market you’ll still be rich. Percentages don’t pay money. People do. A projection such as 0.1% of “China” sounds deceptively easy when compared to it’s identical number (1.4 million customers). It’s important to understand which market matters to you.

• At the top is the total theoretical demand for the product.
• The potential market is the most popular understanding of a market. It means the sum total of all professed demand.
• The available market represents who is there for the taking. This means they have sufficient income to act and purchase.
• The addressable market represents those who are within your reach, after barriers like location, language, culture, etc. have been factored in.
• The target market is who you decide to go for. For a cafe this is closely related to where you place your cafe.
• The market demand is the demand by your target market in a particular period.

So you can quickly see why we drop many zeroes and arrive at a $1M market. In short, the demand for a cafe is best defined by where it is, who else is nearby, and how it is positioned within the local market (e.g. young and trendy vs. family oriented, high end vs. low end, etc.).

Addressable markets online

We’ve all seen a variation of the above arithmetic. Some people prefer a small users base and high price per month instead. You can play with the numbers but the math doesn’t change.

There are billions of people online, so one could argue that two thousand users is a tiny fraction that is easily within your grasp. Once again we’re confusing potential market with addressable market.

It’s easy to see how a cafe in San Francisco will never make money off coffee afficionados in Huntington, Indiana. Heck, even getting customers from more than three blocks away is an achievement. Online there are no geographical boundaries, so suddenly everyone is in your addressable market, right?

Customers don’t have to travel to use your product but every other barrier still exists. This means you still need to see your market as those you can reach through your marketing, advertising, blogging, tweeting, affiliate links and any other activities you use.

Cafes have a small captive market of people looking to a grab a coffee somewhere near their office. Online your potential customers are trickier to pin down. They don’t all live or work in a three blocks square neighbourhood and you’re usually not the only one chasing them.

Different boundaries

The addressable market for start-ups is best defined by the mindshare you can reach. If you think of the web as a massive collection of small- to medium-sized communities (or markets), you see that you need to gain mindshare in each of them. You can reach some developers through Stack Overflow, open source contributions, or popular development blogs. You can reach start-up communities through Hacker News. You can reach designers through Dribbble.

Looking at any community, you’ll quickly realize that you’re never the only show in town. If you’re selling invoicing apps to Hacker News readers, you’re not the only one. If you’re answering questions on Quora to gain credibility about analytics, you’re not the only one. If you’re waiting for Daring Fireball to link up your new iOS app, guess what? So’s everyone else.

SEO, Adwords and the High Street

Acquiring customers through Google ads and Searches is a different strategy. You’re not looking for word-of-mouth here, you’re pitching to transient strangers who happen to be walking by. Targeting the front page of Google is equivalent of open a shop on main st, or in the tourist trap area of a town. You’re guaranteed lots of footfall, but rent is expensive and the visitors aren’t likely to stick around. Besides, as the above image shows, your number one competitor on Google is, well, Google.

This can send you lots of business, but it depends on what you’re selling. As I’ve said before, the path to product for start-ups is rarely “Hmm, I’d love to try an online project management tool, I must go to Google and see if such a thing exists“.

A ground up perspective

Rather than starting with sum total of all online users, try starting with your current audience. That is, the sum total of all the subscribers, website visitors, friends, associates, readers, followers, and contacts of you and everyone within your team. These are all people immediately within your reach.

This is the minimum size of your addressable market, and I’m guessing it’s some way short of two billion people. This is your equivalent of the three block by three block square that you’d open up a coffee shop on. Another way to view your challenge is finding something you can sell to 500 of these guys.

One by one

This is why I believe that customer service is the defining characteristic of early stage start-ups. Your first couple of hundred customers are what makes or breaks you. Delighting your early customers by showing them how much you care is vital in the early days. They will tweet, blog, refer, boast, post screenshots, and more, all spreading the word for you. Crucially, this expands your addressable market. Happy customers beat the crap out of any marketing team you could hire, and they’ll pay for your app while doing so.

People response to this with the usual “How does this scale?” As many have noted, spending too much time stressing about what you’ll do when your customer base is huge is a good way to make sure you never have that problem.

The simplest way to scale is to grow a team dedicated to giving customers a remarkably good experience. How and when you should grow varies depending on the price point, type of customer, and importance of service. Growth doesn’t suit everyone, folks who don’t like it might have to be content with just one million dollars per year.

As I’ve written elsewhere, amazing customer experience is the next must-have attribute for online businesses. It’s not a case of when you should start focusing on it, the ship has already sailed. The only question is: when do you want to start chasing it?