This is Why Your Product Has No Users

We have an idea. We get excited about it and build a product or hire others to do so. We ship it to the world, and then…dead silence from would-be users. It’s about the worst feeling for product people or founders, and it’s shockingly common. I won’t dwell in this post on how to avoid ending up in this state (short answer: excellent discovery, validation, and usability testing). Instead, we’ll assume this is where we are now, and we’ll walk through the most common reasons. Then it’s easy to figure out how to adjust and re-launch.

The problem you’re solving isn’t that valuable

This probably is where most good ideas go to die. A decade or two ago, people built things merely because they felt or sounded good and that was really bad, but most founders have evolved and have at least clearly identified a problem in the market. If you can’t articulate that, then this is definitely the problem, and there is no way your users can understand it either. More commonly, however, the products solve real problems, but those problems don’t have market-viable solutions, generally because the value of solving the problem isn’t that high or the pain from not solving it isn’t that frequent or intense, so the market won’t sustain a user-base paying for a solution. Sometimes the problem is so small that the trouble of downloading an app or going through onboarding doesn’t justify the reward. Or the pain is intense but rare, for example a product that helps you deal with a long wait times at the DMV, and only at the DMV. Or worse, the problem may be valuable but users don’t believe they should have to pay it. This is especially common among social good or political focused apps where the customer, the citizen, believes their interaction with the government should already be handled because of their taxes. A less hypothetical example is the set of friend connector products. Many founders have made products that help us schedule time to meet up with our friends. A real problem exists here for sure, but most people operate at their capacity in terms of social engagement, so automated scheduling of lots of calls actually creates a problem (too busy) rather than solving it. If this is where your product lives, you need to solve something higher on the impact scale.

The solution isn’t that valuable

While it sounds the same as the above, it is quite distinct and this is perhaps why it is the most commonly overlooked reason. Your product is in this camp if you’re certain that the problem matters to people, but you can’t get any meaningful engagement. The solution isn’t producing enough value for the target market. Imagine trying to sell a spoon to someone digging a trench — it is a solution to a very real problem, just not that great of one. This often results from an opinionated founder or product manager dictating that “the product must be X,” and overlooking that the solution to the problem could be X, Y, or Z.

The personal computer market makes this case — many companies had correctly identified that people wanted the power of a computer in their home. The question wasn’t if that problem mattered, it was about how to build an amazing solution to that problem. Two companies come to mind as having solved it in different ways: 1) Apple focused on usability and simplicity for the non-tech geek and that solution proved to be a massive market winner, and 2) Dell focused on making computers exactly to the buyer’s personal specifications but without having to build and configure it. Apple users gave up endless configurability for simplicity (one solution) and Dell customers accepted some degree of bugginess in exchange for people getting exactly what they wanted (another solution). Each blasted open a gigantic market, not by innovating on the problem, but instead by innovating on the solution.

Your product isn’t that usable (yet).

Our target users are thrilled that there’s a solution to their problem and they are excited to use what we’ve built. The trouble here is, the moment they sign up and see the product for the first time, they get scared, confused, stuck, or overwhelmed, so they churn. Our usability is the problem, and fortunately, this is not that bad of a problem to have because it can be solved more easily than a lot of the others. A great designer paired with a product manager and a set of usability tests is the recipe. Let’s review the common types of usability issues that block initial adoption:

1. Our UI writing, the literal text in the product that users read, is confusing so users get lost or confused
2. We put too much in their face on the first screens, hoping that something will stick, but resulting in nothing sticking.
3. We expect the user to hand over a lot of data or private information to get started, before they understand the value. “Just link all your private banking data, your health history, and list your life’s darkest secrets and then you’ll be amazed at how great our product is at reminding you to walk the dog!”
4. The product does nothing until a lot of set up and configuration has taken place.
5. The onboarding procedure is too long or overly complex.

It’s easy to diagnose which of these is the challenge by taking time with users to learn what’s going on for them. The bad news is that many of these can only be improved but never completely “solved.” For example, many analytic products or ones that require user generated content (think Palantir for data and Asana for tasks) ship to customers empty, meaning there is data to populate the features at first, and these products are only valuable with the customer’s data inside it. You can help them get it in more easily, but they still have to get it in somehow.

The messaging doesn’t resonate with our target users.

The product is fantastic. The value is great. The usability is perfect, but when new users confront our messaging they don’t feel like it’s for them. In the early days at mePrism, we faced this challenge. We built a product to help consumers get their private data (search history, videos watched, friend lists, ads clicked etc) back from the tech titans, and then we helped them profit from it by selling it if they chose to. The problem was that these were two totally divergent personas with contradictory concerns. One set of people wanted to see messaging that assured them that their data would be safe and private and never shared while the other wanted to make money from it as quickly as possible explicitly by sharing it. Putting both of these value propositions in the same places deterred privacy-minded individuals from trusting the service and deterred would-be sellers who felt like it was labor intensive and really for privacy people. This hurt both personas, so we adjusted our approach. When the user doesn’t understand what they are going to get, why it matters to them specifically, and when those words aren’t similar enough to their own thinking on the topic, poor messaging is blocking adoption. It’s the difference between “Black Carbon Rocks for Sale” and “Diamonds for Precision Cutting.”

We’re in the wrong market targeting the wrong users

The same exact product sold to a different group of people can have wildly different results. This is where we can lose the most time. It really is possible to build an amazing business on a product that gets rejected by its first 1,000,000 possible users and then grows exponentially starting with a market and persona pivot on number 1,000,001. As a result, we have to test market/persona fit constantly. Personally, I love testing this because the needs can sound entirely different and equally plausible, but until we put the offerings in front of those people, it’s hard to know for sure. For example, at NetworkNerd, we originally built the product for solopreneurs looking to remember hard to remember context about their personal and professional contacts. That’s who all of our earliest paying customers were, but our first totally organic sale without our team in the loop went to a person with early onset Alzheimers. The pain for that market is so much higher than it is for solopreneurs even though they both have a need to remember people they interact with and require nearly the same features. These sorts of mismatches can make a product land flat instead of flying off the metaphorical shelves.

The offer isn’t tuned properly

A final common reason for no or very low adoption is when the deal we make with our customers isn’t balanced enough in their favor. Certainly our offer includes the price we are selling the product for, but it’s much more than the price. It’s the entire package from onboarding to customer support to cancellation options to guarantees to payment structure. An easy example of a terrible offer would be a tax preparer that sells to people under 50 and requires them to mail tax documents to a physical address. It doesn’t matter if the price is competitive with other firms, it’s just too much to ask of people to print, buy envelopes, buy stamps, go to a post office etc.

One of the best offers of the past few decades was exemplified by Zappos. Effectively the offer was “buy as many shoes as you want and send back any of the ones you don’t want without any fees.” Prior to Zappos, if you wanted to try on lots of shoes from an online retailer, you had to pay for return shipping or restocking fees. This extra few dollars and hassle per transaction had limited online shoe sales dramatically. This simple adjustment in the offer combined with great customer service helped Zappos dominate and create a whole market around online shoe sales. We know that once we get a chance with our customers we can be an amazing solution, but they don’t know that yet, so reducing friction in getting them to say yes and give us a try is what adjusting the offer is all about. Sometimes it’s a free month, a price adjustment, concierge setup, transition from a competitor, or maybe it’s as simple as a money-back guarantee. If a customer from our target demographic reads and loves our copy and gets to the purchase screen, we want to make the decision to get started extremely easy so we can get our early users, learn what we need to learn, and adjust. Anything short of this causes us to churn and make guesses about the product when in fact it’s just a bad offer.

While most of the offer examples are consumer centric, we see this all the time with B2B too. The common fail mode for business products is to make the pricing meet the needs of the business instead of the buyer. This is where we get all sorts of complicated scales, confusing questions about multi-tenancy and architecture, and matrices and tiers that only a company employee can truly understand. No one likes to feel like they are writing a blank check or to feel like their billing is going to be a surprise and this can stop a lot of would-be customers from getting involved.

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