This lessons learned series is part of our live SaaS resource list we're
building while launching a new product.
The stories we tell ourselves in our heads about the market might be totally
wrong and so doing customer analysis and monitoring health scores becomes
essential.
What one lesson about health scores was the most important and why?
Data changes instincts. It appears that we can have a gut feeling and
intuition about a product and how customers use it and be completely wrong.
Why? Because our gut feeling is built on how we would use that product, not
how other customers would use it in that big wide world out there.
For example, we might use Upscope to take a look at a customer's screen and
point out a few things. It turns out that many of our heaviest users are using
Upscope to spend 30 minutes onboarding their customers.
Health scores which include usage figures give a data driven perspective on
who is using our product, where and (after further analysis) why. Imagine
being wrong about your customers and building all your marketing based on
those wrong assumptions. Bad idea!
What dumb assumptions did we make about health scores at the very start of
our SaaS journey?
We didn't really think they'd tell us anything wildly different from what we
already knew. It turns out that our biggest customers didn't use the product
for what we imagined and our biggest customers were not who we thought they
were (in terms of usage).
What's the one thing we did that made a big difference?
We not only created health scores based on usage but then we looked at each
individual Upscope user and looked into their job title and key
responsibilities. This analysis showed us that it's not necessarily customer
support that uses the product but customer success and sales teams involved in
onboarding.
Individual job title analysis followed by interviews with customers opened up
a whole new world.
What would we advise someone to do if they were starting from scratch?
Get a health score system like Vitally and plug it into your systems. Do
regular analysis of your top users and critically do interviews with those top
users. Pay them to talk to you. Give them Amazon vouchers for spending 15
minutes answering your questions. You'll see quickly how the data has improved
your understanding but without the interviews you won't see the holes in the
data.
If we had a magic wand how would we use it to improve our health scores?
We'd conjure up a mini-profile for every company and individual user using our
product. That would include total time used, benefits gained, how they discuss
the product internally, how they communicate it to colleagues and friends.
We'd also try and find out what they do 3 minutes before using the product and
3 minutes after so we know the other areas around our product we could help
them problem solve.
How will we use our experience for our new product?
We now know that there are a range of use cases for Upscope and the same will
be true of the our next Upscope "Flows" product. We've done more market
analysis this time and understand how to go about managing feedback and
testing assumptions.
We'll launch, monitor usage and feedback and write down case studies for those
different uses it has. We'll use those to create example pages of how others
can use that flows product. We'll be patient. We'll focus on the core product
and making it even simpler.
The health scores will provide us with real data on our top users and that
will help us focus on them and expand on those core use cases in the early
days.
It's an art and a science. The data is essential but it's an input rather than
the sole lead.
