Warning to startups: not all reviews are created equal

[tongfkymm44]

The context of customer feedback is always crucial. A comment that doesn’t seem relevant today might be good six months later if you shift focus to different markets or business goals. For example, if your next quarterly goal is to reduce churn rate (the percentage of subscribers who cancel their recurring subscription), you can specifically look for comments submitted by users who have just unsubscribed.

Commenting frequency affects the value of someone’s feedback – feedback from customers who rarely use your product or service may be weighted differently than those who use it daily. The type of user (free vs. paid) also affects the value of their feedback to your business. When you’re looking at a comment, complaint, or suggestion, you need to know who it’s coming from – is it someone who has spent money trying to solve a problem or has spent a lot of time? Is it someone who would hire/choose automotive email lists you to do the work for them? If you have a mix of users, log their feedback separately, as free user requests can skew your business priorities.

Product market fit is a two-way street
If you're just starting a startup and you're at an early stage where you need cash, you may be tempted to say "yes" and build new features to get more paying customers, but that's not necessarily a good idea. To build a sustainable company, short-term revenue is not the business metric you should be measuring or aiming for. As a general rule, you have to know that you can't please everyone, so you shouldn't try to either.

In practical terms this means: don't act on feedback like "I like/dislike this" or "I want/don't want that." Don't start developing a feature just because someone asked you to. Don't blindly accept clients who aren't a good fit.

customer-opinion

As your startup grows, you’ll receive a lot of improvement proposals from your customers. Before you jump ahead and develop a go-to-market strategy, check if they fit into your roadmap first. Then, prioritize based on impact (how many people it will affect) and effort (how long it will take you to accomplish it).

If requests don't align with your vision and plans, be honest and upfront about it - having a public roadmap you can share is a good first step, and you'll be surprised at how much respect a sentence like "We really appreciate your feedback, but that's not in our plans/not what we had in mind for this feature at the moment" can elicit.

Similarly, if the time comes to make radical changes to your business model, be transparent – ​​you should never force major changes on your existing customers without informing them first. There are companies like Basecamp who, having outgrown their market and wanting to go after a new one, built three different versions of their product so that customers could move if they wanted to, not because they had to. You won’t have to follow their example and keep all your “old” products or services, but transparency in communicating your future roadmap and future changes will always be key.