When working on a new SaaS product, it's imperative that you build something astonishing — especially to your early adopter users.
This will provide you a solid foundation for traction.
Yes, you could pump up your numbers with "growth hacking" — but if you do that in lieu of building something people are astonished by, you've just chosen a hard life. You're going to have to rely on a lot of marketing on an ongoing basis. If you have a product that astonishes your users, you'll be able to gain users with less effort.
What gets measured gets done
Measure your performance across the important steps of your onboarding cycle, with a survey like this (not verbatim, but you should get my drift):
- Education Were you impressed by how we helped you understand what our product does, and what value you specifically will get out of it?
- Setup Would you say that we went above and beyond the normal call of duty to get you setup quickly and painlessly?
- Day 1 Value Once you were completely setup, were you astonished by the value our product provides?
- Day 14 Value After using the product for the past two weeks, is the value we provide growing exponentially?
MEASURE THIS STUFF. Then track your improvement, across each step, over time.
You don't need a fancy product to do this
Simply talk to your users, ask them these questions, record the scores down in a place that the whole team can see, and report your progress to the team.
Trying to "collect stories of astonishment" drives you to the right work.
— Ry