Keep Calm and Carry On...with Customer Feedback

Rule Four: The Female Maverick Must Dos

You’ve got a minimum viable product, an initial price point and even a few first customers taking your beta version for a spin. Now it’s time to put on your big girl pants and listen, with an open mind and discerning ear, to what your first customers and other key stakeholders have to say. 

But first, take a second to check your progress on our Start Before the Gun Goes Off roadmap. 

Entrepreneurs can be quite sensitive to feedback and criticism. We often either take it too seriously, becoming overly anxious about meeting everyone’s expectations. Or, we become frustrated, concluding that our current customers “just don’t understand us,” and we start looking for a different target audience that will.

Either approach can be costly and/or might jeopardize the success of your new offering. Remember, 95% of products fail (as if you’ve forgotten that terrorizing tidbit). Listening to customers too much can result in adding too many features, making it difficult to achieve profitability early on. Conversely, listening too little can lead to missed insights that could give your product the edge it needs to beat the odds and succeed.

So, you’ve got to strike the right balance and learn how to use feedback to your best advantage. Adopting the following steps will help.

First, release your inner (Adrian) Monk. 

Our approach to customer feedback starts with adopting the persona of this meticulous police detective character. We think of him as detail oriented. But, yes, some would say obsessive compulsive as well. Either way, his style guides how we dissect and consider feedback in a highly analytical fashion.

Specifically, we categorize the feedback by feature. Then, we tally how frequently we received each piece of feedback and rate the intensity of the stakeholder’s feelings. This makes it easy to identify common themes and patterns without leading the witness, i.e. giving extra weight to any comments just because they resonate with us personally. (Note that is why it’s often better – though more costly – to have someone else gather the feedback initially.)

Next, focus on feedback from the majority. 

Now comes the hardest part: don’t try to fix everything at once. Prioritize the recurring themes for now; you can always ponder minority opinions during your sleepless nights, of which you should expect many. Focus on perfecting the features your customers appreciate most. When you’ve improved in these areas, return to the market to gather more feedback. Rinse and repeat until the feedback is mostly positive for these fundamental aspects of your offering and you’ve learned enough to prepare for the big launch.

We were fortunate. Once we reached the right target customer – the general counsel – the feedback was extremely positive, often focusing on what we could offer rather than what we needed to change. The input validated that we were on to what our customers wanted most: the ability to address poor sustainability scores and focus on sustainability disclosures expected to be mandated in securities regulation. Our “maybe later” ideas also proved valuable, and we incorporated them as the market evolved, expanding our pricing options and extending the lifespan of our projects.

However, some features we expected to be major successes turned out to be duds. Public companies initially weren’t interested in broad disclosures; they preferred a gradual approach. And we found certain topics – like employees’ right to unionize – were not going to be touched with a ten-foot pole. As a result, we developed various tiered products and services from which clients could choose as their projects progressed and mandatory disclosures were further regulated.

Take tough feedback with a grain of salt.

One key lesson we learned is that when the feedback is extremely critical, it might signal a misalignment with your ideal customer rather than a flaw in your product. Before giving up, try reaching out to different buyers within your target market. Ones with different budgets, different annual goals or even those with special projects they have yet to tackle because they can’t find the right product or service to help. A new buyer might validate your product without a complete pivot. And that’s a good thing for everyone involved.

 What’s Next?

We’ve come a long way with Rule Four and we will close out next week with a doozy – chasing good enough, not perfection. We can almost guarantee most of our fellow Type-A Female Mavericks are going to have a hard time with this one. We know we did. So, use the next few days to let the idea sink a little, and we’ll unpack it in detail in our next post. 

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