How to Get People to Actually Use Your Product - Part 3: Highlighting Product Value and Driving Engagement
The Real Challenge Isn’t Just Onboarding—It’s Keeping Users Engaged
Once users have successfully onboarded, the next hurdle is to keep them engaged and demonstrate the ongoing value of your product. This isn’t just about showcasing features; it’s about showing users how your product solves real-world problems and meets their evolving needs. Effective engagement strategies can transform casual users into loyal advocates, driving long-term retention and word-of-mouth growth.
What Engagement Really Means
At its core, engagement is about turning curious users into committed ones. It’s a journey with distinct phases:
• Interest: Users are curious about your product.
• Exploration: They start to explore its features.
• Value Realization: They see tangible benefits.
• Habit Formation: Your product becomes part of their routine.
Most startups focus on getting users interested. The real magic happens when you optimize for value realization and habit formation—turning first-time users into lifelong customers.
The Playbook for Engagement
Here’s what separates the companies that thrive from the ones that stall:
Use Success Stories to Highlight Value
People don’t just want to know what your product does; they want to know what it can do for them. Success stories and case studies are powerful tools for demonstrating real-world benefits.
Quantify Benefits: Use data to show how your product has helped other users achieve tangible results.
Make It Relatable: Share stories that resonate with your target audience, highlighting challenges they can identify with.
Implement Feedback Loops
User feedback isn’t just a nicety; it’s a necessity. The best startups use feedback to refine their product and show users that their input matters.
• Regular Surveys: Conduct regular surveys to understand user needs and preferences.
• In-App Feedback Tools: Use tools like in-app polls or feedback buttons to gather instant feedback.
Gamification and Incentives
Engagement isn’t just about utility; it’s also about fun. Gamification can encourage users to explore more features and achieve milestones.
• Reward Engagement: Use badges, points, or leaderboards to encourage users to explore more features.
• Exclusive Offers: Provide incentives such as premium content or early access to new features for active users.
The Psychology of Engagement
Why do people adopt products? It’s not just about features; it’s about the psychological connection they form with your brand. It’s about feeling like your product understands them and makes their life easier. By tapping into this psychology, you can create a loyal user base that not only adopts your product but also becomes a powerful advocate for your brand.
The Blueprint for Engagement—Broken Down
In this part, we’ve explored the strategies for showing (not just telling) your product’s value. Next, we’ll dive into how to leverage data to optimize user behavior and drive continuous growth.
Next Steps
In Part 4: Turning Data into an Adoption Engine, we will explore how to use product analytics to identify friction points, optimize the user journey, and make data-driven decisions that enhance product adoption and retention. This includes setting up key metrics, analyzing user behavior, and iterating on your product strategy based on insights gained from data analysis. By the end of this series, you’ll have a step-by-step framework to turn hesitant users into lifelong customers—and ensure your product isn’t just another startup that people try once and forget.
How to Get People to Actually Use Your Product - Part 2
Crafting a Seamless Onboarding Experience
Crafting a seamless onboarding experience is crucial for driving user adoption and retention. It sets the tone for how users perceive your product and can significantly influence whether they become long-term customers. A well-designed onboarding process should be intuitive, engaging, and focused on delivering quick wins that demonstrate the value of your product.
Key Principles of Effective Onboarding
Simplify and Streamline the Process:
• Avoid Information Overload: Resist the temptation to showcase all your product’s features at once. Instead, focus on what users need to know right away to achieve their first success.
• Use Checklists and Guides: Implement in-app checklists or guided tours to lead users through essential steps without overwhelming them.
2. Personalize the Experience:
Segment Your Users: Understand who your users are and tailor the onboarding based on their roles, goals, or use cases. This can be done by asking questions during sign-up or using data to segment users automatically.
• Highlight Relevant Features: Show users the features most relevant to their needs, helping them reach their “aha!” moment faster.
3. Engage Proactively:
• Automate Support: Use automated emails, videos, and in-app prompts to guide users, but maintain a personal touch where necessary.
• High-Touch Support: For complex products or high-value customers, consider personalized check-ins or dedicated success managers.
Implementing a Successful Onboarding Strategy
Step 1: Welcome and Introduce
• Welcome Emails: Send personalized automated emails that introduce your brand and set clear expectations.
• Kickoff Calls: For high-value customers, consider a brief call to clarify goals and answer questions.
Step 2: Product Familiarization
• Guided Tours: Use tools like Loom or UserPilot to create interactive in-app walkthroughs that highlight core features.
Create modular content that is easily updatable to efficiently train CSMs and your customers.
• Checklists: Create step-by-step checklists to guide users through key actions, celebrating small wins along the way.
Step 3: Drive Early Success
• Identify Quick Wins: Use product analytics to determine actions associated with less churn and guide users toward these early successes.
• Front-Load Value: Ensure that your onboarding process quickly demonstrates how your product solves users’ core challenges
Best Practices for Continuous Improvement
• Iterate Often: Start small and refine your onboarding process based on user feedback and performance data.
• Celebrate Small Wins: Encourage user engagement by celebrating milestones and progress throughout the onboarding journey.
By focusing on simplicity, personalization, and proactive engagement, startups can create an onboarding experience that not only welcomes users but also sets them up for long-term success with the product.
Next Steps
In Part 3: Highlighting Product Value and Driving Engagement, we will explore strategies for effectively communicating your product’s value and encouraging user engagement through interactive features and feedback loops. This includes leveraging user success stories, implementing feedback mechanisms, and using gamification to enhance user interaction.
How to Get People to Actually Use Your Product: A 5-Part Guide for Startups
The Real Challenge Isn’t Building—It’s Adoption
Launching a product feels like crossing the finish line. After months (or years) of planning, coding, and refining, you finally hit “go.” But anyone who’s done this before knows the real work begins after launch.
The question isn’t just Will people try this? It’s Will they keep using it?
This is the game of product adoption—the difference between a product that sticks and one that fades into the abyss of abandoned apps and forgotten logins. Adoption determines your growth, your retention, and ultimately, your success. And yet, most startups approach it as an afterthought.
Let’s fix that.
What Product Adoption Really Means
At its core, product adoption is about getting users from curious to committed. It’s a journey with distinct phases:
Awareness – People hear about your product.
Interest – They get curious.
Evaluation – They decide if it’s worth their time.
Trial – They take it for a test drive.
Activation – They see real value.
Adoption – It becomes part of their routine.
Most startups focus on the first two steps—getting attention. The real magic happens when you optimize for activation and long-term adoption—turning first-time users into loyal advocates.
The Playbook for Product Adoption
Here’s what separates the companies that thrive from the ones that stall:
1. Make Onboarding Stupidly Simple
Your onboarding process is where most users decide if they’re in or out. The best products make onboarding effortless:
TurboTax doesn’t tell you to “set up your tax profile.” It asks, “Do you want a bigger refund?”
Duolingo doesn’t say, “Learn Spanish today.” It asks, “How much time do you have?”
Remove unnecessary friction. Focus on quick wins. Show users how your product makes their life easier—immediately.
2. Don’t Sell Features—Sell Outcomes
People don’t buy software. They buy solutions to their problems.
Calendly isn’t about scheduling—it’s about getting rid of email back-and-forth.
Notion isn’t about note-taking—it’s about feeling like an organizational genius.
Your messaging should be laser-focused on the outcome, not the tool. Success stories and case studies are your best weapon.
3. Let Data Tell You Where Users Get Stuck
User behavior isn’t a guessing game. The best startups obsess over where people drop off and why.
Are users bailing after sign-up? Maybe onboarding is too complex.
Are they engaging but not converting? Maybe they don’t see the full value.
Are they ghosting after the first week? Maybe they need a nudge back.
Every action (or inaction) tells a story. The more you listen, the better you can optimize.
The Blueprint for Adoption—Broken Down
Over the next four parts, we’ll dive deep into each of these strategies:
Part 2: The Art of Effortless Onboarding
How to get users from sign-up to “this is amazing” in minutes.
Part 3: Showing (Not Just Telling) Your Product’s Value
The psychology of why people adopt products—and how to use it to your advantage.
Part 4: Turning Data into an Adoption Engine
How to track, analyze, and optimize user behavior for continuous growth.
Part 5: Scaling Beyond Early Adopters
The secrets behind retention, community-building, and viral growth.
By the end of this series, you’ll have a step-by-step framework to turn hesitant users into lifelong customers—and ensure your product isn’t just another startup that people try once and forget.
Let’s get into it.
Navigating the AI Revolution in Customer Success: A Personal Perspective
As a Director of Customer Success at Jellyfish, I've witnessed firsthand the rapid evolution of our industry. Recently, I've been particularly intrigued by the surge of AI-powered tools in the customer success management (CSM) landscape - even going as far as utilizing four (yes, 4) different AI notetaking apps to assist me in my day-to-day duties, only to have each of them get blocked by our IT team (darn). While these innovations offer exciting possibilities, they've also prompted me to reflect on their potential impact on our profession.
The Double-Edged Sword of AI in CSM
The influx of AI-powered CSM tools is undeniable. As someone who has implemented and used several of these solutions, I've come to appreciate their benefits. However, I can't help but wonder: At what point do these AI systems become a double-edged sword?
My concerns are twofold:
1. Skill Erosion: There's a risk that we, as CSMs, might become complacent and stop developing our core skills, relying too heavily on AI-powered solutions.
2. Over-dependence: We might start taking these tools for granted, potentially missing important nuances in customer interactions that only human intuition can catch.
My AI Note-Taking Journey
To illustrate this point, let me share my personal experience with AI note-taking apps. As someone who struggles with note-taking during calls, I was initially thrilled by these tools. My journey looked something like this:
1. At first, I closely monitored the AI's note-taking during calls to ensure accuracy.
2. As my trust in the AI grew, I stopped actively monitoring and focused entirely on the conversation.
3. Eventually, I found myself only skimming the AI-generated notes, potentially missing valuable context and connections to previous meetings.
This experience was a wake-up call. While AI tools offer undeniable convenience, I realized I might be missing crucial details that could impact my customer relationships and business outcomes in the long term.
Striking the Right Balance
Despite these concerns, I'm not advocating for a complete rejection of AI tools. Instead, I believe the key lies in finding the right balance. Here are some strategies I've adopted to use AI effectively without becoming overly reliant:
1. Hone critical listening skills: I'm working on improving my ability to discern important information during conversations, even when AI is doing the note-taking.
2. Diversify tools: I avoid putting all my eggs in one basket by using multiple tools and approaches.
3. Understand the technology: I make an effort to familiarize myself with AI tools and their limitations.
4. Trust my experience: I've learned to be confident in my ability to recognize when AI outputs need revision or correction.
5. Commit to continuous learning: I'm dedicated to upskilling in both AI technologies and core CSM capabilities.
Embracing the Future
As we navigate this AI revolution in customer success, it's crucial to remember that these tools are meant to enhance our capabilities, not replace them. By maintaining a balance between leveraging AI and developing our human skills, we can provide even better service to our clients. Some things that I will be particularly interested in will be AI’s ability to gauge sentiment from a customers voice, I believe that will allow for even more actionable insights and a better connection with the customer.
It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane…It’s….DeepSeek
The emergence of DeepSeek, particularly its latest model DeepSeek-V3, is poised to have a significant impact on the AI landscape in customer success. Here’s how DeepSeek could affect this field:
Enhanced Personalization and Proactive Support
With DeepSeek’s advanced reasoning capabilities and efficient performance, customer success teams may be able to provide more personalized and proactive support. The AI could help identify potential churn risks, suggest personalized retention strategies, and enhance overall customer experiences.
Transparency in AI Decision-Making
DeepSeek’s focus on transparency, particularly its ability to articulate its reasoning before providing responses, could lead to more explainable AI in customer success applications. This feature could help CS professionals better understand and trust AI-generated insights and recommendations.
I'm excited about the future of CSM and the role AI will play in it. But I'm even more excited about how we, as professionals, will evolve alongside these technologies. Let's embrace the change while staying true to the human touch that makes customer success truly successful.
The Metrics Revolution
Remember when we used to rely on those one-size-fits-all metrics? Yeah, those days are long gone! Now, it's all about tailored, custom-fit analytics that are as unique as your business fingerprint.
Hey there, data enthusiasts and B2B trailblazers!
For this inaugural post on the site’s blog, I thought I would tackle a topic that has been very interesting to me recently—bespoke metrics. With the ever-changing customer landscape and the increasing push to data privacy and personalized marketing, it’s more important than ever that you have the correct metrics to track your customer satisfaction and accurately measure churn rate.
To me, this is an absolute game-changer in the B2B world. No company is exactly alike, and that remains true even down to your customers. Remember when we used to rely on those one-size-fits-all metrics? Yeah, those days are long gone! Now, it's all about tailored, custom-fit analytics that are as unique as your business fingerprint.
The Custom Analytics Revolution
Let's drop some truth bombs: Forrester recently spilled the tea that only a measly 6% of B2B organizations are killing it as advanced insight-driven businesses. Yikes! But hey, where there's a gap, there's an opportunity, right?
Trends That Are Shaking Things Up
1. AI: The Personalization Wizard
AI isn't just a buzzword anymore, folks. It's the secret sauce making our data delicious:
Lead quality? Up by a whopping 37% when AI picks the hottest prospects.
Sales cycles? Shrinking faster than my patience for bad coffee - we're talking 28% shorter!
2. Customer Success: The New North Star
B2B SaaS companies are all about those long-term value metrics now:
NPS (because who doesn't love a good score?)
Customer Retention Rate (keeping those customers stickier than honey)
Adoption Rate (because unused software is just expensive shelf decoration)
3. Show Me The Money: Revenue Intelligence
New tools are popping up faster than startups in Silicon Valley, giving us the lowdown on:
ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue, the subscription economy's BFF)
NDR (Net Dollar Retention, because growth is more than just new logos)
Revenue per Employee (because efficiency is sexy)
Cool Tools Alert!
Centralize (YC W24) for AI-powered account research, relationship insights, and network-led introductions.
Mutiny: Turning your content into a chameleon that adapts to every visitor.
SalesIntel: Like having a crystal ball for your sales team.
Best Practices (Because We All Need a Little Guidance)
Align those metrics with your goals. No point in measuring stuff that doesn't matter, right?
Break down those data silos. It's 2025, people - let's play nice and share!
Embrace AI like it's the last slice of pizza. Trust me, it's worth it.
Focus on insights you can actually use. Data for data's sake is so 2020.
Keep it fresh! Review and adjust your metrics like you update your playlist.
Crystal Ball Time: The Future of B2B Metrics
Predictive Analytics: Because knowing the future is way cooler than living in the past.
Real-Time Dashboards: For when you need to know things five minutes ago.
Cross-Platform Integration: Bringing all your data together like one big, happy family.
So, there you have it, folks! As we cruise through 2025, remember: in the world of B2B, bespoke is beautiful. Those who embrace custom analytics will be sipping success smoothies while others are still trying to figure out their blenders.