101–110 of 127 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was useful. All of the early customer feedback came from those conversations.
did the feedback continue to be useful past the first 1000 or 5000 responses?
A corollary is that if you do have to write a long email, try to start it off with a short, 1-2 sentence intro paragraph that piques interest and pulls people in to the rest of the text. Even better, try to keep all the paragraphs as short as possible. Each paragraph has two jobs: to convey some information, and to convince the reader to keep going to the next paragraph. Done right, you can get someone to read a long…
That's also how most newspaper articles are written. Short paragraphs, often one sentence each. Also, they're top-loaded with all the essential info, followed by a long tail of lesser details as the article progresses (this tail can be cut short in case of space constraints).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
did the feedback continue to be useful past the first 1000 or 5000 responses?
I didn’t get close to 1000 responses, maybe a few hundred, and it wasn’t just the feedback that was useful, those few hundred people I regularly conversed with were the real champions and evangelists for the business.
Every book that about better writing that I read, talks about this. Cut all the clutter, use simpler words, be personal. Do not write in a way that you do not talk. For example, first few chapters of the book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53343.On_Writing_Well talk in details on the topic.
Let me give you some advice...talk less, smile more, don't let them know what you're against or what you're for. Until that is you get their attention, then make the deal. Cuz if you want to get ahead, fools who run their mouths off wind up dead (broke).
Why not?
This is neat! That said, I don't think the statistical size makes this a conclusion you can draw: - "a reply rate of 1% (1 in 100 users)" - "a reply rate of 4% (1 in 25 users)" - "a reply rate of 8% (1 in 12 users)" Sorry to say but... we really can't draw a conclusion like this strictly from these kinds of numbers. Totally possible these conclusions ARE true, but I'd test at a bigger scale and/or with qualitative re…
The sample size was more than big enough to get a significant result. (Netlify was very popular even in 2017.) "1 in 100" = "one in every 100"
And if I like the service but find some aspect of it annoying, I spend half an hour composing a thoughtful response to said email. Nine times out of ten it's crickets. Of course it was a mass email sent to zillions of budding saber rattlers but the lack of acknowledgement, let alone a proper reply, sours me on the service for ever.
I had a similar experience at LinkedIn in its early days. Back when we had maybe 500k members, we A/B tested the hell out of our invite messages. These messages were critical because no one had heard of LinkedIn at the time (~2004ish) and no one knew what social networking was or why they would want to sign up. And getting new users to accept invites was incredibly important to us. We A/B tested many invite email for…
for a long time, there were dark patterns in the account creation flow that tricked users into importing their address book and mass-emailing invitations to join linked-in. the UX made it seem like you were just sending a request to connect with someone who is already on the service.
sounds like this tiny blurb was the seed that sprouted the account creation dark patterns.