Ask HN: How do you determine what your customers/market want?

[RamonMamon]

I've been working on this model deployment/hosting platform for a while now and we've gotten a hundred sign ups already which is at least some validation for the idea. The vision that I had in mind was like a Vercel or Netlify where you push a framework of some model and it's dependencies, then it gets deployed and ready to use via an API.

The problem is that most of these users sign up and never come back or interact with the platform at all. There are also a few of these sign ups who have used the platform once and come back every so often. This indicates to me that there is something that we're missing, some need that we're not fulfilling, for these users that's making them leave.

It's been pretty difficult to get constructive feedback on the platform since they're generally quite unresponsive to our emails.

Being a tech-founder, marketing and sales really isn't my strong suit, so I'm really interested in hearing how some of you have overcome this and any recommendations or feedback that you guys have for me.

My questions are:

- Are there some best practices I can follow to market a product like this? If so, what are they?

- What are some good ways of getting customer feedback and how do you determine if what you have is what customers want?

- What are some better ways to get feedback than just cold-messaging random people on different channels (e.g. slack, discord)?

- (Very subjective) What are your thoughts on another deployment platform? Is it something worth getting into?

[jamil7]

I'm not an expert but I was recommended this book for asking the right questions and found it helpful http://momtestbook.com/

[RamonMamon]

Thanks for the recommendation! I've listened to that book a couple of times and it's been very helpful overall, but I haven't found the proper way to apply it in an online setting, which is definitely a fault on my end haha.

[nowherebeen]

There are three things that struck me in your post:

1) Who is your target market? You mention you have users, but I don't know if they are just random user sign ups or your target market.

2) You are asking for user feedback, but you aren't giving any value. Why should anyone give you feedback if they don't get any benefit from it?

3) The internet is not a good way to ask how to market your product. Most of us don't know anything about your product other than the short description you provided. All you are going to get is generic marketing advice that will have limited use.

[RamonMamon]

Those are actually some really good points. Particularly the 2nd and 3rd one. I'm on the fence about incentivizing feedback though since I'm kinda worried that I'll alter the results by rewarding them with something like an Amazon gift card for example.

And as for our target market, we're currently targeting Data Scientists, MLOps Engineers, and full-stack developers :D

[przeor]

Collect phone numbers during the registration process with Twillio veri codes. Then ask them for feedback via phone number.

You just need to justify during registration, why the user will benefit from leaving the number during registration. You can write it down and half of the interested user will leave the number that you can collect feedback from more efficiently.

[RamonMamon]

That sounds like a great idea! As long as it's not a mandatory field, and properly justified and incentivized, then it sounds like a good way to find willing research participants.

Out of curiosity, couldn't the same result be achieved with an email address instead?

[ianpurton]

From your description it's really difficult to assess what the product is. Can you post the link in your about section of your HN user profile?

[RamonMamon]

Yeah, my apologies. I just updated my bio with the link attached so you can check it out!

[autheticity]

It's not clear if the biggest problem you have is 1. potential users / customers not understanding what problem you solve, 2. that the problem isn't one of their big problems, 3. that your user onboarding needs to be improved, or 4. that their current solutions are satisfactory or 5 something else. Identify it, focus on it, try things related to it.

You are likely a member of your target market - how and why would you talk to a random person or company about some problem or product?

Customer feedback is a combination of analytics, conversation, and observation. You are already getting some!

Talk with users, potential users, and people that leave and find out why. However your users want to be talked to (consider in person, conferences, video chat, differently worded or timed email, chat in the website, surveys, possibly but probably not the phone given the audience). Turn the random text based messages into bigger conversations.

Observe people using your website, signing up to use your product, using your product. What works great? What can be improved?

For getting customer feedback, look into user research and user interviews. This might involve giving people incentives e.g. gift cards to participate.

Read The Mom Test. Short summary here: https://www.slideshare.net/xamde/summary-of-the-mom-test

Other resources:

- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-research-cheat-sheet/

- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods/

- How to do a user research interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qq3OiHQ-HCU

Relatedly, for users falling off, look into "user onboarding"

Here's a useful resource on marketing, messaging, and communication: https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro No need to reinvent the wheel - follow the tried and true paths.

There's a San Francisco based developer marketing agency / co-op / investor agency. I can't recall the name. They have had some prominent developer focused companies over the past decade. They have good resources, including videos on YouTube.

Can you succinctly communicate how you solve some annoying problem people have even if it's small? Of course it's technical, and developers are averse to a lot of marketing, so imitate successful similar companies / products e.g. Twilio, Netlify, GitLab, etc., or whoever has marketing you like. Think about what they look like, what they say, when they send you emails, the entire experience of using the product. Your UX won't be as big and polished - you're trying to build it up and improve it. But small things can add up.

Generally useful resources:

- Short branding exercise: https://library.gv.com/the-three-hour-brand-sprint-3ccabf4b7...

- Working backwords (do the first part of this): https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2006/11/working_backwar... explained here https://www.quora.com/What-is-Amazons-approach-to-product-de...

- Kevin Hale video on building products users love: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12D8zEdOPYo

- Lean Startup (if you haven't read it already, if you have read or skim it again)

- Lean Product Playbook - super practical

- Four Steps to Epiphany: https://web.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi-bin/winter/drupal/up...

Email in profile if you want more guidance / advice.

[RamonMamon]

Wow, thanks for all the resources, I'll definitely give them a look! Man, what you said about imitating successful/similar products that I look up to really hit home for me. Definitely been having a hard time finding a balance between trying to market the product and organically creating traffic by having a good product.

I'll send you an email in private!