Continuing with yesterday’s post on the 3 Main Reasons Entrepreneurs Succeed, the idea of a must-have vs nice-to-have product is one of the more difficult things to evaluate. So many product ideas seem great when you hear them but when you actually experience a new product, most fall short of being truly transformative. At Pardot, we pitched a number of different modules and features to prospects but most people didn’t use 50% of the product. At it’s core, the basic functionality of sending tracked emails, understanding user behavior at the one-to-one level, and tieing it all in with the CRM provided the majority of the value. Yet, based on feedback from customers, we knew that the core alone resulted in a “must-have” product.
Here are five questions to help determine if it’s a must-have product:
- If you told your customers tomorrow that you were shutting down the product immediately, how upset would they be?
- When you send Net Promoter Score surveys to your customers, how high do they rate you?
- If you called up a random customer on the phone and asked if the product unequivocally helps them make more money or save money, would they reply with a resounding “yes”?
- When an existing user changes jobs, how hard do they push to get the product in place at their new employer?
- When your app goes down briefly for maintenance or a server error, how loud and fast are the complaints?
Figuring out if a product is a must-have can be difficult early on. As things progress and more customers come on board, hearing statements like “I don’t know how I did my job before using this product” are good indicators of a must-have app. Use these questions to determine if a product is a must-have.
What else? What are some more questions to help determine if a product is a must-have?
David Cummings on Startups 