[hkyeti]

Well we tried hard to build a great app, going through lots of mockups, user testing, research into how grandparents currently communicate with remote relatives etc.. and genuinely thought it could work based on the feedback.

Maybe there was never a product market fit in the first place, but the early feedback was that there was.

But maybe the product wasn't executed well and that's why it failed. Or there was an audience but it was far too niche.

That's the point, we just didn't even know why it failed.

We wouldn't use it to ask the users what to build necessarily (thought there are use cases for that) but more understanding why they DON'T like it...

even that would have given us a clear idea of what to change first and ignore the rest...

[JoeAltmaier]

Sometimes its as simple as getting lost the 1st time into the app - what button do I press next?

"Onboarding" is critical, and every single step not only Can lose customers but Will lose a certain percentage. Too many steps and your failure rate is compounded. Even losing 10% at each step means losing half after 6 steps.

In an app that requires at least 2 people to work (I work on one of those for a living), I'd guess that the 1st person tries it, finds nobody else online to interact with, and gives up instantly. We solve that by putting an Invite feature prominently in our onboard process. New users connect with someone almost immediately.

[hkyeti]

Hey Joe agree about onboarding..

Actually our flow included invite by SMS, email etc really early on and was pretty simple (we did a bunch of early usability testing)...but still we got very little connect rate, less than 10% of users. Never really figured out the main reason why, just speculation.

I'd be curious what you are seeing in your case... maybe we could have improved it in other ways.

[JoeAltmaier]

Actually we get phenomenal conversion. But we vet our customers (Enterprise) and they're already 'converted' when their boss says "We're trying this collaboration tool" so its fish-in-a-barrel.

I work at Sococo. You can try a trial - its free - and see how it works better than I can describe :)

[hkyeti]

Thanks Joe - I guess when it's top down it's going to get pretty good conversion rates.. appreciate the share :)