February 13, 2020 (4 min read)
A few weeks ago I realized that while being deep down in building my next SaaS, I was losing touch with my product. Who's it for? What problem does it solve? It's easy to get lost in the details, and lack a true high-level vision of what your product does, and for whom.
So I had an idea to send all my users (automatically after a couple of weeks since signing up) a little survey asking for feedback, specifically to understand our value proposition in the eyes of the user.
This is the email I've started sending them:
Hi [user], can I ask you a few questions regarding Mailbrew?
It's a quick private survey only for early users, so your feedback is invaluable.
Take the 90-seconds survey here (link).
Thanks so much in advance. Mailbrew is improving thanks to people like you, and I'm excited to make the product even more amazing.
Fabrizio Rinaldi
Co-Founder of Mailbrew
Users are then taken to a Typeform that invites them to complete some sentences. In fact, I think the key when trying to really understand your product and define positioning is to not put words in the users mouth.
The first one is completely open:
Then here are the sentences to complete:
The survey answers started arriving, and I was blown away by how insightful and high-level some them were. One in particular described the product much better than I possibly could.
Here it is (emphasis mine):
Mailbrew is the taming of the firehose that is today's online information landscape. For the first time, I feel like I can keep up with the things I love without getting completely overwhelmed or falling into infinite rabbit holes that the web is so good at getting us to fall into. Mailbrew is an information diet done right. It forces you to consider only that information which is essential to you and then delivers it seamlessly and beautifully. No more having to check multiple sites. No more hunting for interesting things—it’s all right there, right in my inbox. It will save me heaps of time this year.
In my mind, this answer means remembering that I'm not building a "newsletter builder" or "news aggregator", but "a way to follow your favorite topics, unplug from feeds, and get meaningful information on your schedule".
Here are some of the other answers I'm getting, or parts of them:
Reading and discussing with my co-founder is making all the difference. It's helping us focus on the right things, not lose time building features that are not central to the core experience of the product, and have a clear picture in our mind of what the ideal user should feel like when using our product, and even after using it.
I've already updated Mailbrew's landing page with some of these results, and I'm working on a complete revamp that takes all of this into consideration. Hopefully by launch day, thanks to this effort, people will get what the product is really about instantly. Or at least that's the goal.