The Product is More than the Software and UX
Founder often focus on the product they’re building and too often forget about the rest of the customer journey until they’re ready to deliver it to the customer.
Founders, your product isn’t just your product. Your actually product is the entire comprehensive experience. I so often see founders try to sell their product when all they’ve thought through is the actual product and it doesn’t go that well.
Why? Customers see it all, the entire experience. For your product, they’re the ones taking the journey, step-by-step. And they can and will stumble and fall when a step is missing or wonky.
Airbnb and Qloud
Back in 2006 when we were building Qloud (the music service that grew to 10m monthly users), we thought our service what the actual music service. We tweaked the playlists and playback experience a bunch.
But we ignored what was the most important part - how users found out about us and got started. When we focused on the partnerships to get into Facebook and the messaging on Facebook and social, that’s when we took off. Those were ultimately way more important for our success than the actual product.
When I was at Airbnb, we stuck our entire customer journey up on the office walls. They were drawn by a Pixar animator and we put them where everyone walks so you could see them daily. It was 30 frames: 15 for hosts and 15 for guests. It was called “Snow White”. (Chesky got the idea from a Walt Disney biography, Founder Nate’s Post). We used the frames to think deeply about what we wanted to convey to the customer in that moment.
The Gaps
Between all of these stages there are gaps. Products don’t usually fail in the stages but instead fail in the transitions. No user quits because your onboarding screen is ugly. They quit because they downloaded the app, and didn’t know what to do next.
You have to help customers bridge these gaps. In each of these gaps, the customer asks “why?” Customers aren’t trying to complete your funnel.
They’re constantly asking themselves:
Why should I care?
Why should I trust you?
Why should I spend my time?
Why should I buy?
Why should I keep using this?
Why should I tell a friend?
Every touchpoint has to answer the next “why.”
Your product, and the marketing/messaging of it, and support team of it have to do work here. They need to continually communicate and connect with customers with good messaging and answers. The customer journey needs to be smooth.
Prototyping FTW
How to do this best? To do it right, get a designer and prototype the whole experience. Map out the whole journey of what your product will do. Get it out of your head and onto something you can see. Start from that very first moment of the customer journey. Specifically:
Draw pictures and sketch it in rough wireframes.
Write an imaginary press release.
Create detailed mock-ups that show how a customer would travel from ad → to the website → to the app and what content they would see at each touchpoint.
Think through the persona (and title) of the person buying your product and how they would behave at each step. It’s not “a guy at a big company” it’s “the CFO Charlie at Intel”
And don’t start after you’ve built the main software. Start as soon as possible. This is your MVP. Get it in the hards of would-be customers as it’ll save you SO much time. (More details on how to do it)
Don’t Think You’re Shipping Software
The mistake founders make is believing they’re shipping software. You’re not, you’re shipping an experience.
Every email, ad, onboarding screen, support call, support chat, and renewal conversation, it’s all part of the product.
Design the whole journey.
(Note: i owe inspiration and language to Tony Fadell’s book Build, Chapter 3)