You have to look for the good news

Something I’ve learned over the past couple years working on Color Bliss, and something I experienced also in previous jobs where I was working support, leading a support team, is that you don’t. You’re going to hear the bad news by default.

When you have customers, they are going to try your product, and when they’re unhappy, they’re going to let you know. And that’s a perfectly good thing. It’s great to get feedback from your customers, and it’s always a good sign when people are motivated to tell you the things that are wrong. It means you’ve got something concrete that you can work on to improve, and it also means that they’re engaged enough with your product to want to help you make it better.

So, as demoralizing as it can be to face an inbox full of complaints or nitpicks or what you might see as critiques of your work, one reframing that I try to do for myself and I recommend to all founders and people that are working on products is to take complaints as a sign that people are engaged with your product.

And people aren’t always the nicest when they do complain. And that can be pretty frustrating, but you kind of just have to look past that. Be the kind of person that you want to be regardless of the tone or voice people with you.

Now, one thing that I found personally hard is just hearing the bad news all the time, even with the reframing, even with it being a sign that people aren’t engaged with your product. It still can be hard. So, one thing I found really helpful is to be really proactive in trying to get good news from your customers.

And I found a few ways that have worked well to do this for me. So, I’d say one of the easiest things to do is to send a welcome email when people sign up for your product. Just ask them, say hi, say you’re a regular person and ask them why they signed up.

If you are excited in your welcome email, they will generally mirror back some excitement and they’ll tell you in that time when they’re first experiencing a product, what they wanted to do. And I found a lot of times if your product is working, you’ll get feedback from happy people right then.

And it’s always helpful for me to get that kind of stuff in my support inbox as well and engage with those people and ask them, ask the happy ones what could be better. And you’ll get a little bit more measured feedback from them.

The second way is to encourage testimonials for people to leave reviews. I put links throughout my app, but also I run an email sequence after people sign up and they use it for a few days. They get an invitation to fill out a review either on my site or a third party site.

That can be really great. People will go out of their way to leave a bad review. People don’t often go out of their way to leave a good review. So, it can be helpful to prompt them, give them a little incentive to do that. You can offer them a coupon for a discount if they leave a review. And I found that can go a long way to getting positive feedback.

And then honestly, some days when I’m feeling down, I just pop open my review page and I read through that. That can be really helpful to realize, some days you just hear from people who are unhappy, but there are plenty of people who’ve used your product.

And you can see that over time, those good experiences add up to something real.

Another thing you can do, I guess the third thing, is in your onboarding flow you can ask people why they signed up. This is kind of related to number one, but if you just ask people after they purchase why they signed up, a lot of times you get really good stuff in there. Like I tried all the other tools and this one was the best, or I wanted to make something—for Color Bliss it would be I wanted to make a coloring book for my wedding and the coloring pages turned out the best here.

Sometimes it’s not great feedback. Sometimes it’s not helpful, but a lot of times you will get interesting feedback. And you’ll also learn a lot about the kinds of people that are using your product and then you can tailor your product to those people if you want.

That can be really helpful. I do think the overall takeaway is if you want to hear good news about your product, you really have got to ask your customers. And you’ve got to ask them over and over again.

The more that you ask them, the more likely you are to get helpful feedback or any feedback at all. And then once you’ve got it, you’ve got it.

I know for me, that’s been really helpful—just from time to time reviewing that positive feedback when I get down, but also having it in the onboarding sequence means that I get a lot of feedback. It means that I get a constant drip of the positive feedback as it comes in along with the bug fixes and that kind of thing.

And I’ve got one last idea here. If you’re a solo founder, like I am, that is a unique place to be in. Most people are used to using software that is made by a big corporate company.

So I do think it helps change how people approach you if you just let them know that you’re a solo founder and tell them a bit about yourself and why you started it.

They will be more friendly with you if you act like a person and not like a faceless company.

In all my onboarding emails, I let people know that it’s me. I made this for my kids. Here’s why. I hope you like it. Let me know what I can do. I sign all of my emails with my name.

And then I just try to be as friendly as I can in my responses to people. Even when they come in kind of negative, I just always try to be positive and bring the conversation up to the level that I want it to be.

Not everybody will meet you there and that’s fine, but I feel like that’s the kind of thing you can do to brighten your own day. If you bring a little kindness into somebody else’s day, a lot of times I’ve been pleasantly surprised when somebody comes in hot and angry in my email about something.

I just go out of my way to be nice to them. I might tell them: Hey, I’m sorry it didn’t work for you or sorry you didn’t like this. I’m just a guy, I was with my kids all weekend, so I couldn’t get to your message.

A lot of times people are really understanding if you just explain to them where you’re coming from. You’d be surprised at how you can turn a lot of negative interactions around.

That’s what I’ve learned. If you want to get positive feedback, you’ve got to be really proactive about it.