If you're an early stage founder, it can be really easy to lose sight of the big picture. You spend tons of time jumping from fire, fixing bugs for the noisiest of your user base to keep them happy. While this is a somewhat necessary component of startup life, it can also end up giving you a pretty skewed view of how your product is actually being used. Oftentimes, your noisiest users aren't actually representative of your userbase a a whole. In fact, if you spent all of your time worrying about making them happy, you may look up a few months later and realize you've gotten fairly off track of your initial intentions with your product, maybe even making some of your other users unhappy in the process.
In order to help mitigate that, set aside some time at least once a month (though preferably every couple of weeks) to take a step back, look at the activity patterns of your user base as a whole, and make sure you're still working towards the right set of things.
If you're not sure where to start when it comes to this kind of audit, try following these steps - and take lots of notes about your observations as you do:
1. Check your numbers
Hopefully, you have some analytics in place already. Start by reviewing any of the broader metrics you're tracking - how many sign ups you have, how many paying customers, how many people have taken certain actions in your product, etc.
2. Compare them to the last time you ran this
Numbers in a vacuum aren't that helpful! Compare the numbers you're seeing to the previous interval - have things changed? If this is the first time you've run it, try doing something like comparing this month to last month (number of signups in September vs August, etc). Really, ideally you have a dashboard in place where you can pretty easily see changes over time, but if not - do it manually.
3. Find your top 10 most active users and take a look at what they're up to
You'll want to narrow this down to recently active - so figure out who took the most actions in your product in the past 14 or 30 days. Then, take a deep dive through their behavior. What exactly did they do in the past 14 or 30 days? How active were they to end up qualifying as "most active." What else do you know about them - what's their user persona? How did they originally find you? What similarities are there among the top 10?
4. Find your top 10 most valuable users and take a look at what they're up to
Similar to the above - figure out who has paid you the most (either because they're on a more expensive monthly plan or because they've been paying you for a long time) and take a look at who they are and their activity. You'll likely see some overlap with the last 10 you looked at - but if you don't, that's something worth investigating further!
5. Find your least active users
In this case, you'll likely not be able to observe much about their behavior, since they probably won't have any. However, take a look at any data you do have, especially how they ended up finding your product. If it's the same way the most active users found your product - don't worry. If it's different, it's worth taking a deeper dive into that marketing channel and making sure that it's still worth the time or money you're putting into it.
6. Check for anyone who was in your top 10 active or valuable last interval and has since dropped off the list
For this step, you'll want to figure out why they dropped off the list - is it because they decreased their interaction with you, downgraded their plan, etc? Or is it because some other users became more active, but their activity stayed the same? If it's the second one, it's not necessarily worth worrying about. If it's the first one, it's worth investigating further to see if you can figure out why their activity dropped off. Did they perform a certain set of actions right before stopping their activity? Did they reach out to report a bug or feedback?
7. Reach out to some set of the users you found in steps 3-6!
Obviously, if you've spoken with them recently, you can likely skip this However, if you got to this point and realized you've never spoken to some of your most active and valuable users because they've been drowned out by some of your noisier users - this is the time to change that. Reach out to as many as possible, ask for feedback and try to get onto a call if possible.
8. Reflect
As you're going through these steps, you likely saw some things you expected and some things you were surprised by. Make sure you give yourself a little space to think through what you saw and if there's anything you need to do as a result. Maybe you spotted that people are using a feature more or less than you expected, and you want to revise your roadmap. Maybe your top 10 users are coming from a different marketing channel than you expected, and you want to rebalance your marketing budget. Maybe you got some great feedback from the users you reached out to and you want to incorporate that into your larger company strategy. Giving yourself space to adjust is important - if you don't, you might go back to putting out the wrong fires.
This exercise is written in fairly generic terms in order to help as many founders as possible. However, each company is going to have a slightly different set of things they should be looking into when it comes to understanding their users. If you want some assistance customizing this plan, I can help! Schedule 20 minutes with me today.