"Your product is a piece of sh*t": How this feedback changed my company

"Your product is a piece of sh*t": How this feedback changed my company

Years ago, I got an especially mean Tweet. It said (please excuse the language):

@Hootsuite f**k your f**king UI, it's a piece sh*t and it f**ks my personal sense of well being. I'm out.!

This hurt at the time. Today, I see it for what it truly is: pure gold.

To be fair, our dashboard wasn't all that bad back then. But it did need a revamp. And this user took the time and effort to point that out, in ... well ... the most forceful way possible.

Hootsuite now has more than 15 million users. The majority of those use the free version of our social media management platform. They pay absolutely nothing. But they mean everything.

Too many companies overlook the value of "free." But free users—like the friendly soul who sent the message above—are honest. They're demanding. They stress test your product in every way imaginable. They jump ship at the drop of a hat. And they insist on the latest features.

All of this comes in handy when, as a business, you turn your focus to landing paying clients—especially the huge companies that represent the biggest deals. I can honestly say: we wouldn't be signing seven-figure contracts today, if it weren't for servicing the users who pay zilch.

For other companies—whether you're selling software or something else—here are a few insights we've learned along the way on the power of free.

Keeping your ear to the ground with free users

Hootsuite was born in 2009 as a tool to help people manage multiple social networks at once. You could see your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn all on the same dashboard. It was was easy to use and free, and we had tens of thousands of users in the first months.

The best disruptors—whether that’s Google or Dollar Shave Club—learn to listen very closely to those initial users. In fact, they have to. Because the barrier to entry is so low—with no contracts or long-term commitment—users are always ready to leave for a better offering. The only thing keeping them tied to the product is its innate usefulness.

This was definitely the case for us. Competitors sprouted up left and right. To keep and grow our user base, we had to develop an intimate feedback loop with the people who loved our platform. We set up forums and ambassador programs, and we held meetups around the world—both virtually and in person.

All of this input was poured back into our product. We pushed out hundreds of updates a month to make the dashboard easier to use. Eventually, we realized people would pay for a beefed up version, and a “pro” option was born in 2010, targeted to small and medium businesses. 

The business software black hole

This organic evolution may all sound intuitive. But it’s actually the opposite of the approach traditionally taken by tech platforms that set their sights on big companies as customers. Rather than catering to end users, they focus largely on satisfying the demands of IT departments and CIOs—the buyers in large companies.

This leads to products with robust security and an encyclopedic feature set … that can also be terribly unintuitive and difficult to use. Because companies are locked in for long contracts, updates come sparingly. Compatibility with other programs is limited.

The result is a kind of enterprise software black hole. Companies sink huge budgets into sophisticated platforms, but they’re either difficult to use or not flexible enough to keep up with changing demands. Money, time and frustration go in, but nothing ever really comes out. 

The user revolt   

Eventually, however, the users themselves get fed up. Used to consumer-friendly apps and hardware at home, they come to expect that same at work. Clunky Blackberries are abandoned in favor of easy-to-use iPhones. Outdated file management software is dropped for Dropbox. Gmail overtakes Outlook.

We saw this same phenomenon happening up close. In many cases, users at big companies were doing an end-run around their IT departments, ditching standard-issue company software in order to use our platform. It only made sense for us to try to level up our service and go after those same big enterprises. 

Our first “enterprise” version came out in 2011. Looking back, our initial efforts were scrappy … and maybe not quite ready for primetime. But just as with G Suite and Slack, there was a groundswell of demand from frontline employees. Sheer usability helped us land some major contracts right out of the gate.

Staying hungry (and faithful to free users)

It’s easy—even inevitable—for the pendulum to swing too far, however. The scrappy upstart becomes the industry leader. Instead of catering to end users, attention shifts to landing those huge deals. Just a decade or so ago, for example, Salesforce billed itself as the “anti-software” and bashed Oracle as bloated and out-of-touch. Today, this same critique is being levelled at Salesforce, with its complicated sales and marketing clouds.

There is an antidote, of course—staying obsessed with the free users. Google, not surprisingly, is a master at this. Today, Gmail’s billion-plus free monthly active users dwarf the 3 million businesses who pay for G Suite. That won’t change anytime soon. But having a focus group that large ensures that Google is always miles ahead of its competitors. (Not to mention, lots of those free users will graduate to paid packages.)

Closer to home, I’ve seen the same thing. We now serve plenty of big customers, including more than 800 of the Fortune 1000 companies. (In fact, I'm incredibly proud that industry analysts Forrester recently named us a “leader” for enterprises in their latest Wave report.)

But I’d argue that our strongest competitive advantage is that we started with an SMB focus and still have millions of free users stress-testing our tool everyday—discovering flaws, letting us know when our “product is a piece of sh*t” and demanding new features.

For tech companies, it’s strange but true (and all too easy to forget): the most precious users are those who pay little or nothing … and demand everything.

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Alex Banman

Sell More With GENIUS Brand Design.™

6y

I'm wondering how I could apply this to a service-based business like branding... I suppose that would be in the form of blogs, workshops, website tools, etc. Thoughts?

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Ryan Benson

Manager of Emergency Planning @ PHAC | JIBC Faculty Adaptive~Inquisitive~Collaborative

6y

There's a curious analogy here to the music industry...maybe Hollywood to a lesser degree. Both freaked out at the piracy revolution. Yet both are thriving today – at least the providers who didn't fear those unpaid fans...instead learning from Youtube and Torrent trends to find niches, and use them to more effectively sell experiences that can't be pirated. Like live shows or million dollar AV setups in theatres. Bottom line - don't fear the cheap-ers!

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Gaby Araujo Z.

Head of Marketing at Musho AI

6y

Great post! I was a user a couple of years ago... I really loved Hootsuite over any other platform... like Buffer. But I got to admit that the dashboard design was just too painful for my eyes. The design felt like 2005 but we were actually in 2015! Overall an amazing platform, I hope you have improved that design! 😉

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Great read.. thank you!

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