Feedback collection for WordPress plugin [Episode 2]

Recap of Episode 2 of WordPress Plugin Startup Show: 23 June 2020

Homework first:

In the previous episode, we talking about Lean Canvas.

It’s a handy tool that helps you to find product/market fit for your startup faster. I already had mine filled out for the SpeedGuard (see the Episode 1 notes) and Nathan was supposed to do the same for AB Split Test.

Key points about the Problem that AB Split Test can solve:

People know they should care about how well their website converts, but don’t really track performance and don’t know exactly how to do so

Testing and optimizing for conversion sounds as something hard to deploy, expensive and time-consuming.

Possible Customer segments thoughts:

Can be website owners, agency owners, SEO people (love this name! like party people, but SEO people 😉

But more importantly — it’s someone who is interested in improving conversions rate >>> so the best guess is someone using WooCommerce.

+ As AB Split Test makes it easy to test things in Beaver Builder, Elementor and Gutenberg >>> that’s someone who uses either of those.

Unique Value Proposition that we were playing with: a tool to improve conversion rate fast and easy.

Turned out (I wasn’t aware) that plugin runs tests and then picks the best performing button/title/whatever you’re testing automatically. To me, it sounds like a strong selling point.

As Lean Canvas is supposed to be worked with on regular basis these blocks and others, perhaps will get updated later.

For our next episode, Nathan’s task is: to think about Customer Segments more and try to describe them as Customer Personna (meaning, a person who is kinda typical representative of this segment).

↑ That was exactly my homework for today for my plugin.

* SpeedGuard is a WordPress plugin to keep an eye on your site speed, in background.

As currently, SpeedGuard has 100+ active installs (and it makes me solo happy!) this is just my assumptions, but I came up with 4 Customer personas:

I think James is the one <3

And perhaps, Rich is the one for the PRO version of my plugin.

There a lot of templates for describing Customer Persona.

This one is mine, that’s what I usually use for my clients when planning WordPress SaaS stuff.

I find it really handy, cz the Question section helps to define the main problem which is different for each segment, so the solution will be different too and the message will be different also!

And How they might find out section makes it easy to couple audience and message with marketing channel later.

The topic of this episode: Feedback

Asking for,  collecting and using feedback

I believe that it’s important to start collecting feedback as early as possible. There are 2 aims here:

1. To do something people want
2. Not to do anything they don’t care about

Probably, in the opposite order is even better.

I would rather spend another hour watching a sunset than coding stuff no one ever will make use of.

I think not all feedback is of the same type. Perhaps, different approaches should be applied to different types depending on purpose. For instance:

1. Feedback for testimonials as a social proof
   • for landing pages etc (3-4 best, name, position, name of the company) 
   • for sharing in social media (viral marketing etc)
2. Feedback for bug fix (Github public repo <<< add from other sources too)
3. Feedback for new features:
   • I really like WP Feedback’s Trello board. Vito Peleg mentioned in some interview that they don’t even need to put much effort to decide what to do next – people clearly let them know
   • I also like the idea of testing new features before actually building them through the landing page, Maziar Firuzmand shared how they do this for Jupiter X theme in the interview here
4. Feedback to retain customer
   • on deactivation
   • on refund request
   • when canceling recurrent payment
5. Feedback to specify usage scenarios and customer persona for better product-market fit
6. And feedback to make documentation based on use cases
7. Feedback as a way to promote plugin
   • Asking for the feedback (survey, interview etc) from a specific customer segment to let them know your solution exists: how do you deal with problems so and so? You need to provide something valuable for their time in return though!)

So depending on the purpose of feedback these would vary, I think:

1. Asking for feedback
2. Processing
3. Applying

Few notes about asking for feedback (for testimonials, mostly) from this post by Andrian Tobey from Groundhogg:

• Do not offer incentives to give you feedback, such as discount codes or rewards
• Everyone understands stars, so use them
• It’s easier to get new great reviews than to change the minds of 1 star reviewers…

Current state of things for SpeedGuard:

• Quite a few people messaged me on Facebook or Twitter to share what they think, I used to collect those thoughts in one doc but never got it structured, so it’s pretty hard to use
• I used to ask about feedback as admin notice 7 days after SpeedGuard is installed and that way I received 0 feedback.
  I changed it to this sidebar widget recently:

• Now I have 8 reviews in WordPress repo, and they all are super nice (some from the people who know me in person)

• I made a public repo on GitHub for SpeedGuard just recently after someone asked how to contribute and I was like 🤔

* Nathan made a very good point suggesting to give some educational information after plugin activation and before asking for feedback, they do this for AB Split Test.
I think this is a great idea!

So my task for the next episode (Tuesday, June 30) is:

to define and set up the ways to collect, process and store different types of feedback for SpeedGuard: separately for bugs, ideas and testimonials

Next week we’ll be talking about making about planning a product development based on feedback.