There are two main categories of user feedback: Free users and paying customers. Here’s what each category means.
Free User Feedback Is Marketing Advice
Free users haven’t committed to paying for your product or service. You can’t trust them to tell you how to improve it. But you can trust them to guide your marketing process: It’s the process that will help them know whether they want to move forward into your funnel and lay down some money. Here’s the difference, as explained by investor Elias Torres on the Drift blog:
Paying User Feedback Is for Big Changes
Here’s Torres on paying customers’ advice:
The End Result? You’re More Proactive
Armed with this feedback, you’ll be able to identity problems that you might never have noticed otherwise. As another blogger, Reforge CEO Brian Balfour, put it: “If the results are positive, keep going. If the results are bad, then stop and feed those learnings back into your next set of hypotheses in a series of iterations.” It just so happens that the people who make these shared requests tend to be paying customers, since they’re the ones who know better than anyone what could be improved upon. So they all end up finding the same weak spots in the product and telling us about them.” By addressing these issues, you’ll both fix your marketing problems and improve your core product. By channeling your feedback into two categories, your next response will be clear.
