How often do other Indie Hackers talk to their users?
Real phone calls with users. We do this as much as possible and have found it to be essential to building our product. Are we outliers with this process or do others do this as well?
Real phone calls with users. We do this as much as possible and have found it to be essential to building our product. Are we outliers with this process or do others do this as well?
We stick to emails and chats via Intercom. It takes a little longer to learn but because we will never be making sales calls (we are 100% inbound), it helps us learn how to navigate our chat conversions. e.g., Real phone calls may help us learn about products fit faster but it wouldn't inform our marketing strategy/copy as effectively IMO.
Interesting. Can you elaborate on why phone conversations wouldn't help your marketing strategy / copy? Right now, we're extremely focused on our messaging and most of our ideas stem from conversations we've had with our users. You have a different system that clearly works so I'm really intrigued by that.
I'm sure phone convos would probably help but we can communicate with so many more users using chat/email and it informs our copy/marketing pretty well.
Important to note though that we have been building a product that enables people to achieve something they know they want. When they find our product, they know exactly what they want it to output. There isn't a lot of opportunity for business discovery unless we wanted to build other products in the space. If we were building something companies were exploring or just figuring out, we would need phone conversations to read between the lines.
Based on what you are building, sounds like phone convos would be critical.
I try to have calls with my users as much as possible (ideally a few times a week). I'm building a tool that helps developers generate a custom React codebase for their project, so it's super important I learn about what they're building so that I can improve the architecture and handle more things for them out of the box.
First off: Where the hell were you 10 months ago when I was starting my web app? That sounds awesome. I struggled big time with react patterns, stripe, and auth0.
Second: What's your process to go from conversation with user --> prioritized investment in product? For example: Are you recording your calls? Frantic note taking? Photographic memory? I'd love to hear more about this process.
"Frantic note-taking" sounds about right :)
I then transcribe into Notion and sometimes cross-link to those notes from feature request cards to keep track of how many people have asked for a given feature.
Love it. 2 things:
The combination of these 2 point led me to record my calls with users, and listen back. This process led to some of our most pivotal value adding features.
This process is also incredibly time consuming. I actually started using my own product (which was built for a different purpose) to simplify this process. I can't overstate how much this has helped.
If you resonate with this, I'd love to jump on a call.