I'm a solo founder with a product out for 6 years now. Although it's in a big market, it has a small user base (1000 monthly actives) and brings in a small amount of revenue (~300 USD MRR). Savings from prior job are enough to get by where I live.
I have the skills to make the software a lot better but I've been burned enough by building features that might or might not get used. So, I've kind of frozen further product development until I figure out how to get users to talk.
I'm a good communicator, genuinely care about solving problems for users and love talking to users, but I can't seem to get users to reply. I used to do hand-typed emails and got some success out of it with poor conversion (1 out of 200 replied). Because hand-typed was hard, I started using automated welcome emails and got almost nil response. I've been using automated welcome email for more than a year now and yesterday I turned it off as I thought it might be hurting my brand rather than helping.
I'm feeling down that I have the capability to build but I can't get users to talk.
YC advises to "talk to users".. but "how to first get them to reply to my request for feedback" is the #1 problem for me. I'm starting to think I have to up the psychology game to get a reply.
Some solutions I've thought of but yet to implement: 1. Persistence: hand-type email to users and follow up gently week after week up to 3-4 times. 2. Bribe: entice users with a good offer on the product or a gift card to get them to reply 3. Be goody two shoes: provide an opt-in for emails during sign up. But I think nobody will opt-in.
Any advice on what could yield a reply from a user? I am prepared to hand-type emails every day if that's what it takes.
But it is still good advice. What I do is send out an occasional email to update users on any issues we've had and upcoming updates, and I always encourage them to call me anytime if they're having trouble or need or thought of a change or new feature. And I generally make light of it, telling them "Hey, I get lonely sitting here coding all day, so any excuse will work for me" (Maytag man).
The point is I try to make it very easy for them to contact me. I make a point to tell them "It's always my fault if you're having trouble". And when they call I make a point to listen.
At the beginning of this year we shut down 3 old versions of our app after setting up accounts for all those users on our new app, so I got to talk to a lot of users who'd procrastinated and I made a point to ask them if there were any changes or new features they wanted or needed and I got a lot of great feedback, but in most all of those cases they contacted me and I made a point to follow up with emails and phone calls.
During the months leading up to shutting those old apps off I made a huge number of bug fixes and tweaks and added some new features to the new app, all based on user feedback, and it is a much better app now. So the importance of that is spot on.
In fact, now again my phone and email are quiet. Pretty much only new users and just a few of those contacting me. For me, that's a relief after having a very hectic previous year and it's indicative of the app maturing and working as expected for users. But I couldn't have done that without them. And it was pretty overwhelming because there were a lot more bugs than I expected.
So now I'm able to once again spend some time "marketing". The product is polished enough for promoting now and I have some ideas on who and how to market it to.
Developing is my passion so that's hard for me. I am going to take a crack at it though.
For figuring out which features a user wants, my old company tried this and had a lot of success. The product was aimed at small businesses and it was a dashboard to help them manage Yelp, Google, Tripadvisor, Foursquare, etc. listings all in one place. So we figured they would want to update their info like phone number or hours, so that should be one tab, and replying to reviews was another big thing so that was another tab. Those were set in stone. But we weren't sure if they wanted a tab for promotions (create a campaign and post it on Google, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and customers could redeem with a QR code and there would be analytics), competition (pick N competitors and track their ratings, reviews, etc side by side with yours), social media (see mentions of your business across social platforms and see sentiment analysis over time), or learning (a series of online videos that you could watch, tailored to your business based on different metrics).
So we built out the first two tabs (profile and reviews) but we had dummy tabs for promotions, competition, social media, and learning. Clicking those would popup a form where we would let them ask to be notified when the feature was available, with a freeform text field where they could explain why they wanted or didn't want the feature, or what they expected it to be. It turns out that competition by several orders of magnitude was the most requested feature, and promotions was a non-starter (only a fraction of a percent of users ever clicked on it).
If you have to be more aggressive, chances are you're targeting the wrong type of user. Your next business step would probably be to find a good channel for the ideal user.
If you don't get support requests, try making contacting you easier at potential pain points.