#94 - A Nice-to-have Problem?

#94

                May 24, 2021

            #94 - A Nice-to-have Problem?

                When your free product satisfies the needs of most customers, more user research, and behind-the-scenes work to make the user experience even better!

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#94 | 24 May 2021

When the free product is too good...

That is a nice problem to have, right?

A bunch of you replied to last week's email — thank you so much! — to tell me about your experience (or lack of!) with Plus and the free trial.

Turns out people are really happy with the core product and don't feel the need to upgrade! 😅

My synthesis of all of your responses to last week's newsletter. The colours relate to the type of feedback: pain points (red), piece of neutral info (yellow), and potential opportunity (green).

Is this cause for concern for our business, you might wonder?

Not at all!

When you do a focused round of customer research, you decide upfront what type of user you need to speak to. 

When you send an email out to 4500 people, any type of customer, with vastly varying needs and usage patterns, can reply!

The insights were definitely valuable and helped me to decide on next steps, but I'm keeping in mind that the people who gave me feedback may not be the customers we should be focusing on for Plus.

Looking at my last round of customer interviews with the people who use The StoryGraph every day, 71% were Plus members!

All of this information suggested that the next step was to find out what made Plus more than just a nice-to-have for our most engaged users, and how we could make the offering even more valuable for them and others like them!

Since last time...

Something else we learnt was that people who were currently paying or on a free trial weren't clear what came as part of Plus and what didn't, and a whole other group of users just forgot that there was even a paid plan to upgrade to.

A quick improvement here was to add Plus badges around the product to make the whole thing more obvious! 😅

A lot of Plus users don't realise that this is chart only available to them. Now they know! 😌

A few days after doing that, all-time conversion rates were up to 12% from 9%, and conversion for the month was up to 20%!

I also conducted another round of customer research. Last time, I learnt that our every day users read a lot, tracked everything, and were obsessed (healthily, of course) with the stats.

This time, I wanted to dig some more into why the stats were so compelling in order to help prioritise what new charts and graphs we included in the next iteration of the dashboard. 🤓

Stats on authors, format, languages, and how ratings related to different moods and pace were all things that came up!

Next two weeks

We've still been focusing on a lot of slow, behind-the-scenes work, and that will continue for a little longer, despite us itching to get new features out.

We're rejigging a lot of our code and infrastructure in a bid to make the whole product work more smoothly. We hope that these changes will also enable us to more easily provide delightful user experiences as new functionality is added!

What I'm reading right now

I'm really enjoying Esuantsiwa Jane Goldsmith's memoir, The Space Between Black and White!

Have a great week,

Nadia

P.S. Know somebody who's an avid reader or would enjoy following along with this journey? Please do forward this email to them! Thank you. :-)

Haven't tried The StoryGraph yet? Check it out today!

Love the site? Consider upgrading to our Plus plan!

Want to volunteer? Apply to be a Librarian!

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