Sharing my experience of talking to users: How to get them and what to talk about

I used to have a B2B product for social media content planning and growth management. ~230 signups and ~50 active users. I know the importance of talking to users, and I'd like to understand what their real workflow is or what their real opinion on my features is.

But they all come from random places on the internet and I always find it difficult to get them:

Email almost doesn't work. I tried to send it to the entire user base but only got 2 replies: one is "Don't send again", the other is "Your email sounds too much like AI, hope it helps". Come to think of it, it has several issues:

1. Likely your email will end up in spam. Email credibility is related to your domain settings, IP, reputation with mail providers and lots of other factors. Getting them all straight is hard work. But there's a great tool to check if your email is gonna land in spam at different providers: glockapps
2. People will only open the ones most important to their lives. When they open the inbox and face a bunch of emails, your request for feedback clearly falls outside the "important" category.
3. It lacks context. People may have opinions when using the app, but 3 days later in their mailbox, they can recall nothing and perhaps they have already forgotten your app.

And I did some research on Reddit and found many people facing the same problem! Seems email is the only way for 90% of founders to get to users, and it sucks.

Then I read lots of articles and found that in-app feedback could be 10x higher than off-app feedback, meaning you need pop-ups at the right moment to collect opinions.

So I started putting effort into making these widgets and hooking them up with the moment. For instance, originally I had a feature where you can put your brand name as a keyword and monitor Reddit or X to see if someone mentions it. But not many users were using it and I wanna know why. So when users go into that feature page, a widget will randomly pop up, greet users and then ask what their use case of this is and whether it's truly useful.

And it worked well! Later that afternoon, I got a simple but valuable message: "I monitor the keywords of niche problem instead cause my brand is not famous yet. But it's a little bit noisy". And it was a spark for me, I realized what I should have thought of: my users are not big names, so their first priority is user acquisition.

So I changed that to a credit-based paid feature – Give AI a prompt with what you are looking for and the standard, and it helps you filter the keyword monitor results. This feature keeps getting me cash every month 💰.

Also I found putting a "Talk to founders" button with your avatar in the corner helps a great deal. People are tired of talking to customer service or chatbots, but talking directly to the CEO, someone in charge, is much more attractive. It helped me find a frequent crashing bug on Firefox, which I didn't have time to test before launch as a solo founder. That at least helped me save my Firefox users.

Gradually I got even more interested in the user feedback tool I made, and I refactored it and made it more general. Here are some principles I put into it to push the response rate to the limit:

1. Be proactive. Pop up at the proper time to find users, don't let users find you – in most cases they won't. And add a cooldown to avoid spamming users.
2. In the app, with context. People don't hate talking, but you need to ask them right when and where something happened. You pick a topic that is happening and they will open up.
3. Show up as the founder, as stated before.

And asking the right questions is very important too. Here are some of the essences I summarized:

1. You don't just ask superficial questions like "What's your feeling" or "Do you like it". People will politely say something good. Ask for facts instead, for instance "What do you use this feature for?", "Could you walk me through your real workflow?" or "Would love to know one thing you don't like".
2. Always ask deeper when available. For example, at first I only had a feature that let a founder clone his AI stand-in to talk to users. When I recruited a new user for this tool, I just felt happy and helped him set up and debug. One day he asked me: "You never asked me why I want to use your tool." And later we talked and I realized his urgent need is user acquisition, so he actually needed a way to talk to users himself, which is better than letting AI talk. His original words were: "I will get up at midnight to use this!"

So I added the live talking feature, so the founder gets notified when a visitor comes along.

That's my story with talking to users. I still believe it's a gold mine. It's not like other tools that directly save you the time of doing X. Instead it costs your time, but helps you avoid detours and save more time at a higher level, if you do it right. You will constantly get valuable insights from it, no matter whether you're a starter or a big name.

BTW, I am beta testing the feedback tool I mentioned above. DM me if interested.