Customers Will Tell You They Love Your App and Then Never Use It
A founder who built a social app for books and movies learned to ignore praise and watch the usage logs instead.
Medium · So You Want to Build in Consumer Social: A ManifestoAfter spending half a year building an app to discover and curate what to read and watch, a founder wrote about how hard it is to seek the truth as a founder in consumer social.
She described that search for answers as “sailing through a cacophony of siren songs — any of them could be the truth, and you don’t know for sure until you’re out the other side.”
Her summary, in her words, was: “Consumers lie.”
What she meant, she wrote, is that consumer users love to say, “Oh yeah I would totally use that! I need that yesterday,” and then not use the product. She argues that encouragement of that kind cannot be trusted as a guide to what people will actually do, writing that “you can never rely on direct feedback.”
She gives two reasons for the gap, as she sees it. One is that people do not know themselves and are not honest with themselves. The other is that the people offering opinions are usually “your friends and acquaintances who want to avoid hurting your feelings.”
For that reason, she writes, a founder in consumer products has “to look at actual usage history and instrumentation data,” which requires a founder to “build a product and get it in users’ hands to get any sort of meaningful signal.”
Questions people ask
If I can't trust what users say, what should I measure instead?
She says to look at actual usage history and instrumentation data from a product people can try. That means building something and getting it into users' hands, since only how they use it gives a meaningful signal.