Ask HN: How best to get early feedback from users?

TL;DR: I'm nervous about my product's future as I don't talk to users. I want to change that asap.

I'm a solo founder with a product out for 6 years now. Although it's in a big market, it has a small user base (1000 monthly actives) and brings in a small amount of revenue (~300 USD MRR). Savings from prior job are enough to get by where I live.

I have the skills to make the software a lot better but I've been burned enough by building features that might or might not get used. So, I've kind of frozen further product development until I figure out how to get users to talk.

I'm a good communicator, genuinely care about solving problems for users and love talking to users, but I can't seem to get users to reply. I used to do hand-typed emails and got some success out of it with poor conversion (1 out of 200 replied). Because hand-typed was hard, I started using automated welcome emails and got almost nil response. I've been using automated welcome email for more than a year now and yesterday I turned it off as I thought it might be hurting my brand rather than helping.

I'm feeling down that I have the capability to build but I can't get users to talk.

YC advises to "talk to users".. but "how to first get them to reply to my request for feedback" is the #1 problem for me. I'm starting to think I have to up the psychology game to get a reply.

Some solutions I've thought of but yet to implement: 1. Persistence: hand-type email to users and follow up gently week after week up to 3-4 times. 2. Bribe: entice users with a good offer on the product or a gift card to get them to reply 3. Be goody two shoes: provide an opt-in for emails during sign up. But I think nobody will opt-in.

Any advice on what could yield a reply from a user? I am prepared to hand-type emails every day if that's what it takes.

1. Do you have user metrics where you can see who your top 10% of users are? 2. Work out who your top 10 users are and do what you have to do to get in contact with them. 3. Tell them you will be building features if they response to a survey. 4. Offer them $ to chat on the phone.

How did you get these users? They signed up on their own through the app or website? With such a small amount of users, you should collect a phone number and just call them.

For figuring out which features a user wants, my old company tried this and had a lot of success. The product was aimed at small businesses and it was a dashboard to help them manage Yelp, Google, Tripadvisor, Foursquare, etc. listings all in one place. So we figured they would want to update their info like phone number or hours, so that should be one tab, and replying to reviews was another big thing so that was another tab. Those were set in stone. But we weren't sure if they wanted a tab for promotions (create a campaign and post it on Google, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and customers could redeem with a QR code and there would be analytics), competition (pick N competitors and track their ratings, reviews, etc side by side with yours), social media (see mentions of your business across social platforms and see sentiment analysis over time), or learning (a series of online videos that you could watch, tailored to your business based on different metrics).

So we built out the first two tabs (profile and reviews) but we had dummy tabs for promotions, competition, social media, and learning. Clicking those would popup a form where we would let them ask to be notified when the feature was available, with a freeform text field where they could explain why they wanted or didn't want the feature, or what they expected it to be. It turns out that competition by several orders of magnitude was the most requested feature, and promotions was a non-starter (only a fraction of a percent of users ever clicked on it).

> How did you get these users? They signed up on their own through the app or website?

Users install the app from an app store and sign up on their own.

> With such a small amount of users, you should collect a phone number and just call them.

I'm not sure what reason I'd give to ask for their phone number as using the product doesn't really need that. What do you think would be a good way to request users for their phone number during sign up, when the sole reason would be for me to contact them for feedback? I'm not averse to the idea, just can't think of a good way to ask.

> we had dummy tabs for promotions, competition, social media, and learning.

Wow, that's an exceptionally good idea. Something I can easily test out. Thank you!

+1, just call them.

But treat them like humans, and not a fucking strip mine.