Shaping product and marketing with customer insights- Part II
How Loom, Duolingo, Uber, DocSend, and Webflow leveraged user insights.
Hello, I’m Hema, and welcome to my newsletter First Impression. I help early-stage startups with their positioning, brand, and GTM strategy, and I also write about these topics.
In Part I of this newsletter, I wrote about how to listen for what your customers are not telling you, and in today’s post, I will cover the following:
What is an insight?
How to identify it?
Examples of products shaped by user insights
Examples of marketing shaped by insights
Note: I’m only using B2B SaaS examples here as I primarily work in that space. I have helped/advised some of the startups mentioned in this post.
What is an insight?
It is common practice for product and marketing teams to get direct feedback from customers through interviews, surveys, and social media, as well as gather indirect feedback from behavioral data. But many times, I’ve noticed teams acting on what they mistake as insights when in fact, it’s one of these:
A data point (x% said they did not want to talk to a salesperson)
An observation (they tend to hit the browser back button instead of using breadcrumbs)
A customer’s wish or desire (I wish I could see a dashboard after I log in)
None of these are an insight. So what is it?
Gary Klein, a cognitive psychologist, defines it as “an unexpected shift in the way we understand things” (Insight literacy: why we need to clarify what insights really are). An insight often allows us to see human behavior from a fresh perspective or discover an underlying motivation that drives people’s actions.
I’ll continue using the same example of the finance app I used in my earlier post to illustrate the difference:
Pain: I have to log into so many accounts to make sense of my finances.
Motivation: It makes me anxious when I’m not on top of my finances.
Need: I need to know at a glance what my financial life looks like.
Desire: I wish there were a simple and easy way to keep track of my money and investments.
Insight: I want to feel in control of my financial life and not fall behind the curve when it comes to managing my money.
Think about how different the finance app might look if we acted on the insight vs. the pain itself or the need. A company could do many things to tap into the insight of “I want to feel in control of my financial life” vs. just building features around the need, pain, or desire. If we build a product around the pain, then we are only addressing their need of wanting to see everything in one place i.e., a single pane of glass. But we miss the most critical part: feeling in control. Feeling secure. Feeling on top of things. A single pane of glass alone is not going to solve that.
An insight becomes a beacon that illuminates a path for an organization to connect with its customers. It informs everything a company does: product, marketing, support, and sales.
How to identify an insight?
Here are a few pointers to confirm that you are using insights and not just a need or a desire to shape product and marketing:
Ask why and go deep: Insights operate at multiple levels. They don’t address just one pain, need, or desire. They address a deeper motive, a fundamental truth that has not yet been acknowledged or addressed in a meaningful way. One tactic I use when I hit a dead-end is to ask yes, but why? and it often takes me down different paths that get me to a deeper motivation.
Get emotional: An insight always connects with the user at an emotional level. It makes them feel seen and understood. If it’s not visceral, it’s probably not it.
It unlocks a hidden door: It brings a new level of understanding to a persistent problem and opens up a channel of creativity that empowers the team to solve the problem from a new place.
Using insights to shape product
The good news: you know how to spot an insight. The bad news: identifying it is just the beginning. Applying the insight to shape product and marketing is both challenging and fun. It’s where we can truly get creative. The best way to understand this is to look at a few examples of products that were shaped by powerful user insights:
Duolingo taps into the insight of persistent learning
Known for using gamification to make learning fun, Duolingo understood that consistency is key to their success and also key to the language app’s retention. The app is designed intentionally to make learning a habit with cute Duo reminders, streaks, leaderboards, and leagues. The app rewards persistent learners with the concept of streak - a feature that tracks the number of days one has practiced. The app tracks daily streaks, invites users to enroll in streak challenges, inducts users into streak society (the benign green Duolingo logo changes to a blazing “Duo on fire” logo seen above), and gives users limited streak freezes that protect them from losing their streak if they missed a day of practice. I, for one, hate missing a day of learning Spanish and having to use my streak freeze quota!
Loom helps us get over camera shyness
Loom made some very smart early moves, including decoupling their chrome browser extension from their app and making it easier for users to record themselves or their desktop right from their browsers. But most of all, what I think Loom solved really well is that moment of camera shyness we all feel when we have to record ourselves. Of course, the pandemic changed all that, but it is to Loom’s credit that they unlocked this well before the pandemic. By designing the app to focus not on the person recording the video (you are but a small bubble on the screen) but on the task at hand, Loom helps people get over that barrier. They also built virality smartly into their product which
covers nicely in this post, Your guide to product viralityUber keeps us engaged with transparency
Uber is well known for leveraging behavioral science to remove friction and engage users. In early 2018 when they launched Express Pool (now UberX Share), riders accustomed to a faster door-to-door experience quickly canceled their ride if they had to wait. Uber’s research team identified three concepts idleness aversion, operational transparency, and goal gradient effect. They leaned into operational transparency by keeping the rider informed about what was happening behind the scene (operational transparency), showing riders where their ride was and who was being picked up (idleness aversion), and giving them an accurate sense of when their ride will arrive including a progress bar (goal gradient effect).
Using insights to shape marketing
Powerful behavioral insights can not only help us build smart, sticky products, they can also guide marketing and messaging. Below are a few examples of marketing that tapped into user insights:
DocSend taps into curiosity
DocSend, a secure, document-sharing app that Dropbox acquired, noticed that sometimes people tried to access documents shared via a secure DocSend link after the link expired. DocSend tapped into this behavior by sending the owner of the document an email alerting them that someone was trying to access their expired link. This email not only brought the owner of the document back to the product, it told them that the product tracked valuable behavior that could inform their business strategy. For example, someone clicking on an expired fundraising pitch deck or a sales deck sends a signal that they are interested, which could re-engage a cold lead. Docsend leaned into this with their messaging “Move business forward.”
Webflow leans into fear of complexity
The no-code website builder was undoubtedly ahead of its time, and its brilliant turn from underdog to unicorn is now the stuff of Silicon Valley legend. Webflow entered a crowded space with an opinionated view: building a website should be as easy, elegant, and beautiful as designing one. The startup taps into the core pain most marketers and designers feel when they want to stand up a site — having to code one. Webflow leans into this pain messaging on its homepage.
It also tells this story in this brilliant, funny video👇🏽
Abstract makes collaboration pain-free
Abstract, a version control tool for Sketch files, understood one of the biggest fears of designers: that not all their explorations were saved, and when they needed it the most, they wouldn’t find it. This was before Figma became the defacto design tool, and designers used Sketch to design, + Dropbox to store files, + Invision or Zeplin to prototype! Abstract ran with this insight with the core message of “Design with confidence.” In Abstract, every exploration was saved, and a designer could easily roll back changes without jumping through hoops. They also created a series of videos that spoke to the pain of collaboration, and 👇🏽 video is a humorous take on what it’s like to collaborate under pressure.
Can you think of an insight that led to a deeper understanding of your customer? How did you come upon it? How did it inform your product or marketing? Comment below!