STOP Ignoring Early SaaS User Feedback - But Don't Follow Blindly!

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all right I am just leaving CrossFit it's a pretty rough morning um the workout today was just running and I'm terrible at running and I can't see anything out of my back window okay we're doing a live here we go no regrets okay we survived it's a weird spot to back out of um yeah it's just the run this morning um supposed to be 7K which for any of you that run that's nothing I understand um I don't have like much cardiovascular capacity so I think I Ran 2 km and then got back to the gym and used a a bike instead but like man like the the echo bikes so to explain a little bit of background I've been bodybuilding for a long time so uh proportionally like most I guess my upper body is not that great which is kind of funny because

like stereotypical bodybuilding like you know big chest big shoulders big arms but like disproportionately my legs are actually significantly better than my upper body and uh my quads in particular are pretty are pretty large so if you think about having more muscle mass in your legs in particular your quads and not having any cardiovascular capacity what happens on a bike is that as soon as I start to get like a little bit fatigued like the lactic acid in my quads just gets nuts like they're not used to doing a lot of uh continuous volume if I were to do a lot of squatting in a particular workout um if I were to do one set with a lot of reps um that would destroy me significantly faster than doing you know a lot heavier weight uh many sets at lower reps and that's how I

would train was like many sets lower uh lower reps so like 3 to five rep range heavier weights um and just do way more sets that way I can do heavy weight and get a lot of volume in um but doing that over a long period of time means that kind of screwed for this kind of stuff so it's going to take me a while I'm not uh I'm not letting it like discourage me it's like it's just kind of funny because after being in a gym for so long like it's it's embarrassing for for cardio but um overall I think on the Echo Bike it's about uh three 3 km to um like the maps to like 1 km of running roughly so I got about 5k in total instead of seven uh and we had I think we had the full hour to

do it but the coach was like get to 40 minutes and that was a little bit after that was 5K for me so I'm I'm actually very happy with that and it's funny right now I sound a little winded obviously but compared to a normal workout I'm actually okay in terms of uh being winded what's kind of ridiculous right at this moment is that on the echo bikes you use I'm not sure if you know what an Echo Bike is I didn't before CrossFit um and my wife talking about it but the echo bikes like you use your arms on them as well and right now the only thing that hurts are my triceps my triceps are cramping so my arms are extended right now but if I go to touch my face my tricep has to like lengthen and it's killing me so kind

of funny um but overall survived it so I'm happy um so yesterday I was sick and I didn't get into the office and like I woke up and for me I've noticed especially as I'm getting older like the pattern is if I'm sick when I wake up it's significantly worse um it's like just from lying down like way more congested all the symptoms are way worse so yesterday I woke up was not having it had to skip CrossFit took some medicine uh went back to bed as the day went on I was feeling progressively better and then uh again this morning like I I convinced myself Nick when you wake up in the morning you're going to to CrossFit because I knew at night it was going to be a run and I said that would be good for for you get outside and run

I'm a big believer that like as long as you're not like dying that you should be going out and getting physical and um getting your blood moving um if you're not feeling well I think it helps like everything so um again I woke up this morning and I was like oh I feel like a bag of crap but I said no take some medicine go out get running I feel pretty good right now like I can tell my my sinuses are a little congested but I'm glad I did that but that meant yesterday um I took the day off work so kind of I I didn't go into the office I dialed in for a couple of meetings and just told people like I'm probably going to be offline um I had an employee the day before that was out for being sick so I

think there's just something going around but um you know I trying to like lead by example a little bit and letting people know like I'm not like hiding at home and just like not doing anything like I'm announcing I'm not feeling well I'm going to be offline um but the the thing I don't do well for modeling is like I still want to if I'm able to dial in to for one ons if I can if uh I had a couple other things I wanted to like call in for because I was able to and I don't want to give people the impression that like I expect out of them that's been something I've kind of had to battle with my whole career but um I feel like as a manager and just like my personality like I I want to be able to do

that cuz like I just want to be able to help so if I can then why wouldn't I so I just have to be careful with that that I don't perpetuate like this idea that oh you're sick well you still better call in um I don't think people get that Vibe um and I think my my manager I feel like is very similar like he's he's created a really good culture on the team like I'm not going to go as far as saying like it's a big family because I know people hate that kind of phrasing But like everyone on the team is very close and he's very supportive of everyone so um he also has this kind of thing where he needs to watch how he's uh sort of showing how he's working and communicating things like based on the time of day um

and he's very conscious of it he'll like his signature uh in emails and stuff literally says like my working hours will be different than yours like don't don't respond kind of thing so I think the team has like a good awareness of this kind of stuff okay so that's my rambling for this morning um I wanted to talk briefly about some meal coach or meal coach that's so far in the past now um brand ghost brand ghost stuff so um last night before bed uh we did a little bit of a not a bug bash but like a I think a ux bash so we had a little bit of feedback rolling in now from a few users which is great um I've talked about this before but I just want to like kind of highlight it so um the people that I'm working with

we have a lot of experience being able to work with user feedback to refine things and uh specifically take things that are complicated for an audience and make them so that you literally cannot mess them up like we have a lot of experience doing that with very technical things the difference is that when we've done it in the past we've we've had like the user base if that makes sense like we haven't had to go out and try to build the user base we just had it um so by having it already and then just using the information like analytics and then you know surveys and things like that and actual customer meetings it's way easier way easier because you have all sorts of data and you can collect data from your audience for us without an audience we have to be careful because what

we need to do is understand meta points about the feedback right so um not only is it hard for us to build up the audience because it's not something that we're skilled at doing with experience doing but um for example if one person says like I don't like this or one person says you should do this we can't we can't just over index on everything and like be a complete pendulum someone says this we go 180° and go do it um we have to listen to the feedback and we have to understand the meta points so that we can translate that into like what is the pain point this person's experiencing and we will come up with the solution we can't have users that sort of dictate the solution to us not because we like don't believe what they're saying but like we need to

be in a position where like we understand holistically what's going on so hope that makes sense but the the idea was last night we had I think I think we had enough feedback to start taking some action um on on a handful of things so um and Shout out again I shout out Ryan Murphy on here I know he watches thanks Ryan uh you know definitely like we took a lot of your feedback for yesterday and it actually overlapped a lot with uh with stuff we've kind of heard before but I think sort of different flavors of it which is cool because again like I think some people I know for even for myself right I get nervous about feedback because it's like we obviously want it to be good and you know if you're getting critical feedback like it's probably going to hurt your

feelings a little bit but the reality is like it feels so much better to get feedback that you can go act on like if someone's like hey this just sucks or hey this doesn't work I would so much rather have someone tell me that so that I can go make it awesome then no one ever use it right like that's that's the difference so I think for things that we were addressing last night we had uh we actually had a a bug that we didn't realize but when you would go to as a firsttime user you would go to sign up to the site it would bring you to the login page when you went to press sign up and that's actually a bug like there's logic in the code that's supposed to bring you to a reg ation page instead of sign up but

uh something had regress there and for context like this seems like a little thing right like um when you go to the login page it says like there's a button that you can click to go sign up so it's not like it would be impossible to work around so you press sign up on the main website it brings you to the app which is a login page it's not supposed to do that but that's what it was doing and then there's a sign up button now I'm not suggesting that that's what we should do that's actually a bug but what's interesting if we think about this from our goal right now is to have uh users right so we need to make sure that we have our funnel of users like they they can't possibly mess things up right it's so guided they can't screw

it up and if we think about it like a funnel right so the and let's let's zoom out even further than just the app so let's say that we're we're publishing things to social media to try and direct people or there's ads running like that's the very top of the funnel it's the widest part it's going to have the most reach and then from there the funnel keeps getting narrower until we have like uh the other end of the funnel is kind of like paying users that want to upgrade okay so that's like the extreme other end as you go from the widest and sorry you go from the one end to the other it goes very wide to very narrow and that registration sit situation is pretty much near the beginning so even if like let's let's assume like to round down only 1%

of people were confused by that you press sign up and it brings you to a login page instead that has a sign up button on it if only 1% of users were confused and I think the number would be higher if it's only 1% that's early on in the funnel that 1% can have a significant impact so point I'm trying to make is that small issues near the beginning of the funnel make an enormous difference in terms of conversion so that was really even though it seemed like small we looked into it right away especially cuz we were like that's weird it shouldn't be doing that so it fixed that up which is really good feedback the other thing and I've talked about this on on this Vlog before but we have an onboarding workflow there are tons of police officers out right now but

there was a state trooper that passed me there were two other unmarked SUVs on the other side and then I saw on the other side of the highway there's some flashing lights so they're coming for me um the onboarding workflow for us is huge because the the way that you the way that you need to get set up is like it's a little bit unusual and like that's already assigned that we need to do better work there but when you're using other social media tools for Content scheduling what you would do is add your accounts and then you just go to something that's like a calendar view or like a post View and you say I'm going to make a new post and pick a time but that's not what we do because we don't just do oneoff posts we need to basically have this

uh like it's a cad if you will so it's recurring content ideally you have enough content that it doesn't repeat that often but like a lot of big social media creators do this it's uh it's not it's not unusual right it's actually very common so in order to set that up you basically have to go configure the content that you want to post and you have to configure the schedule and you have to configure your accounts like there's a little bit of work to do to get up and running so number one we need to make sure that that feels bulletproof and that's why we talked about or at least I mentioned on the Vlog before like we have this onboarding flow that we just really have to nail like people can't people can't screw it up so what we were talking about last night

and we still need to to implement this is like number one there was a bug because the onb boarding flow wasn't showing up for some users so uh Ryan was one example where he said like I don't know what to do when I log in and I was like well the onboarding flow was supposed to do it but he never got the onboarding flow and there's been more than just him that's had this issue so we looked into it we found like there's some some edge cases Edge Edge cases with some some browser storage state that can uh mess things up so uh we addressed that as a as a workaround but we were talking about this more like philosophically and we wanted onboarding to be like the primary way like this workflow to be the primary way that you get set up but we

were also like hey we don't want to force anyone like if you're not ready to do it just yet like then you can go explore but we're realizing like there should be no other option like we should force you down that path to on board and then there's no questions about like I don't know what to do right um You there's nothing else you can do in the app until you've onboarded so we should literally force you to do that so that you have no confusion um now there is a small like uh uh feature Gap that prevents us from doing that that we have to address and then we're going to make that switch so that anyone who's signing up you don't get to use any part of the app until you've added your social accounts um and we do like even though it's

a small set of data we do have data that suggests one people get their social accounts added and create their first topic stream to be able to post content the success rate all the way through is like like the drop off rate is so low at that point it's very high before that because the barrier to doing it's high so again onboarding workflow um we've fixed up a little thing for that and then we are making sure that going forward will kind will force people through it and that way there's there's no way to mess it up we also talked about like putting a little bit more education in so not only are we going to force people through that workflow we're going to teach people about what's happening as they go through it uh because we think that's important and the reason why it

requires some teaching is because it's a little bit of a different approach to to social media right like I think people are there's a lot of people that are doing this sort of naturally on their own um and like I don't think people are talking about it in like a consistent way so for example you might have people that they approach social media like they want to go make viral posts okay and this is I think the most popular attempt at like social media there's people that sell choruses on this stuff they'll say like every post I make is viral like I can't can't not make viral post I'm so good at it watch what I do like here's the formula and some people are able to nail it there are a lot of things with respect to uh especially for like short form video

there's a lot of things that um like kind of keep people hooked right and that's the idea is that you catch people's attention and then you keep catching their attention with like sub Hooks and then you just keep them watching you might have noticed there's like a a format of advertisement now on social media that's getting a lot of popularity and I I find myself watching them because it's hard to look away but they're like really long form ads like multiple minutes and the whole time it's someone like continuously talking it's like rapid fire and they like the scenery and stuff is changing and like it keeps you going like like what's happening here like what's the next thing that's going to happen it's it's really catchy and like that's the kind of thing that like you know there's formulas for this kind of stuff

but the point is that like even with a formula you're not going to it's not going to be perfect every time it's it's impossible to have a viral video every time you post and have a perfect formula or else everyone would have viral videos all the time it wouldn't make sense so that's one way to approach social media and I think that like that would be the most draining like perfect recipe for Burnout approach ever um and I'm saying that as someone who's been posting every single day for 21 or 22 months now now and I wouldn't survive like not at all on one platform even like if I just did Tik Tok there's no way I could do that cuz you're always trying to look for new ideas and like try things out like it would be the worst in my opinion um so

the other way that you can do it like on the exact opposite side is just focus on like helpful content there's like things you can mix in that try to help like you can try to use some of those formulas but you don't want to make it so that you're trying to make a viral post every day you just want to be helpful because it's more of a long-term strategy it's slower but it's longterm and with our approach we like definitely lean on that side of it being slower and more long term so our approach is that you create content that's valuable and you can repost it later because it's still valuable so some people are doing this and they're doing it by using just like third party tools like notion obsidian uh Google Sheets Excel like whatever like anywhere they can like keep copies

of their posts and then when they need ideas they just go look through their little repository of content and they go oh I haven't posted this in a while let me post it so they're doing this and I've seen business like my I'll give you a couple of examples my sister works at real estate uh agency and she has said that they periodically repost some content because like why wouldn't you if it's valuable and it was doing well repost it um one of the guys that we have onboarded with the real estate and the roofing company he's like he absolutely agrees about posting or like reposting content I was reading through Reddit and there was someone talking about like they are doing social media management for a lawn care company and he was saying that he's reposting content like people do this all the time

and it's not like it's a scam it's not bad if you think about content creation and your audience it's very rare like if you compare the the number of people that scroll through a profile to go look at existing content versus it just showing up in your feed it's disproportionately more showing up on your feed and scrolling through the profile so people are not going to see the stuff that you're posting and it makes sense to post it again if it's good content it's a bit of a rant but um to get people set up in that frame of mind like we have to educate them a little bit some people they get it right away because they're like I'm already doing this like I have stuff in notion or wherever else obsidian um so they're like I get it now I just have to

bring it in so cool and other people don't and that's totally cool like it's not their fault or anything like going back to what I said at the beginning of this it's like it's our job to make sure that we can educate them and on board them like very seamlessly and that way that way they don't have to worry about this stuff if they don't know it um like we can teach them the value of it obviously they got far enough where it seems interesting it seems like it could help and now we need to prove to them with as little barrier as possible so yeah we have more work to do with the onboarding but I think it's going to be it's going to be super effective the the closing thought cuz I'm just pulling into the well not this isn't my driveway this

is my street but the closing thought is that I uh I got to take the garbage out crap we've been talking about like trying to vet like feasibility like interest uh what features and stuff people want but like I don't think we need to do that and we were talking about this last night it's like the the features are going to be valuable I think we're at a point now where we have to say like how do we get the people on like how do we get them onto the platform we know that it's already useful so anything we can do to reduce that friction is like Paramount once they're on once they're using it because there is already value there then we can say well what do we do next to at on this and make it better so that's the Spiel for this

morning um yeah I think that's it so thanks folks it's a quick one cuz I was driving from Crossfit not to the office see you later take care