“Great post by Jason Cohen”:blog.asmartbear.com/blog/put-… on why you need feedback about the real reason people aren’t buying your product:
"You need to talk with the people who were interested enough to find your website, read your marketing copy, download your product, and then _give up without even an email_. That's the low-hanging fruit; those are the people who are _in your grasp_, who should be buying _today_, but aren't."
I fall into this trap quite often, of pretending I know what the product needs for sales to finally take off. So I’ll add all the features I hope customers want, or I’ll make a small change and see if sales improve. But the truth is that there are so many variables in this system that it’s difficult to know which change made the difference.
As an example, I decided recently that I was being too generous with the demo limits in “Clipstart”:www.riverfold.com/software/… so in the 1.2.1 release I turned them down a little. Instead of letting you tag 30 videos and upload 3 for free, it’s down to 20 videos and 2 uploads. The idea is to just do a little bit more to encourage users to buy the software when they are first trying it out and like it, rather than waiting a month until they decide to use it again.
Sales have been up the last week, so this worked, right? Maybe not. Clipstart has a review in this month’s print edition of Macworld, so it’s possible the sales are up because of that. Or because a couple of my blog posts have been linked more heavily recently. Or for any number of other reasons.
Unless you measure why the product doesn’t sell, success will be based on luck and intuition, which only go so far. I’m looking forward to reading Jason’s next post.
