With all the ideas and feedback coming from your customers, colleagues, and stakeholders it might be hard to calm your mind and focus on the actual customer needs. For every customer-centric organization, keeping customers satisfied is non-negotiable. But what features will make your product as right as rain? And what’s this secret sauce that gets your customer needs satisfied?

Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers. — Seth Godin

The Kano Model has all the answers for you. It is one of the techniques we use in Cleevio for identifying customers’ needs. It helps to define the attributes of products and services which directly lead to better satisfaction. It was developed in the 1980s by Japanese professor Kano, and since then, it’s been widely used by marketers and product leaders from all sectors (case studies from the automotive industry, air transport, or construction companies).

Identifying Customer Needs

Relationship between feature functionality and customer satisfaction.

Customers are buying products with expectations and needs and therefore, the product's functionality and features directly impact customers’ emotions. Based on the Kano model, each product feature can be categorized by their caused effect: Mandatory Features, Satisfiers, Delighters, Indifferent, and Reverse Features. Let’s take a look at them one by one.

Mandatory Features

Also called “must-haves” or “basic expectations”. These are the baseline features of the product that satisfy the basic customer needs. They take them for granted and as a characteristic for its category. For example, when you buy a phone, you expect that it’s capable of writing and sending text messages, making phone calls, etc.

The presence of mandatory features does not lead to happiness or excitement, but their absence leads to a strong dissatisfaction. With the lack of emotional affect, they’re difficult to identify just by asking “What features would you appreciate?” It’s better to ask the other way around: “Would you be disappointed if the feature was missing?”

Note: At the very early stage of the product It is important to not overfill it with features. You can build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) offering the core set of functions and add features based on customer feedback.

Performance

Among performance features, you can find user requests and features with a linear impact on satisfaction or features that express the quantitative capability of the product. It’s typically true that bigger is better.

Different configurations and implementation of these features can help to separate one product from the other and create a competitive advantage. A highly demanded feature or superior performance might work as a unique selling proposition. Nowadays, popular Freemium products such as Dropbox, MailChimp, or Airtable use Performance features as the main component of their paid plans.

Performance features increase the satisfaction level when fulfilled and a decrease in the satisfaction level when not fulfilled. Their fulfillment is often directly dependent on the price of the product.

A good example of performance features is e.g. smartphone camera resolution, storage size, or battery life. Also several questions and responses in different SurveyMonkey plans.

Delighters

So-called excitement/attractive features are often represented by something extra; special value which customers get despite their requirements. They demonstrate that someone really cares about customers and thinks about the small details that truly make for a unique experience. They show above-standard quality and exhibit exceptionality.

When delighters are missing, nobody complains. If they’re present, they might lead to a significant increase in satisfaction. These features make the difference between Viable and Awesome Products. Customers are telling their friends and family about them and everybody loves them. But be careful — delighters will only work when all the basic expectations are met first!

Customers are slowly getting used to the delighters, and they’re becoming performance features or even mandatory features over time. A good example is the car air conditioner. Originally used in the 1960 Chrysler Imperial as a sign of luxury and unprecedented quality. Today, every newly produced car has one and it’s considered a baseline feature — nothing special.

Reverse and Indifferent Features

Both Reverse and indifferent features are those you should avoid in your product. Reverse features are opposite to satisfiers — the more of them that you deliver, the less satisfied your customers will be. These features are bringing complexity to your product and harm its value.

Indifferent features are those that don’t have any impact on customer needs satisfaction or overall experience. ROI of these features is simply so bad that it doesn’t make any sense to spend resources and time on building them.

At Cleevio we've developed over 120 digital products in the past 10 years so we have enough experience under our belt, to identify both Reverse and Indifferent features so feel free to reach out to us and we'd offer you a free consultation.

Satisfying Customer Needs Using The Kano Model

Alright, now you got the basic concepts of the Kano Model. Let's take a look at how to use it. Just like for any other research method, users and their opinions are key for successfully sorting your product requirements into the Kano categories.

Step 1: Chose The Right Features and Customers

Even though your backlog might be overflowed by features from various fields not all of them are ideal for the Kano questionnaire. You should always include only the features which directly impact your users so they can easily determine how much they’d like to have this feature.

Also, don’t include too many features in one questionnaire. In past runs, we’ve found out that around 20 features should be the max for a good completion ratio and to produce satisfying data.

To avoid noise and unclear results, segment your customers using your own customers' groups, demographics, or approach to innovation. Segmentation will help you to distinguish which features are important for the whole user base and which features will delight only a small user segment.

Step 2: Data Collection

When you have a list of features, it’s time to prepare the questionnaire and get the data. In Kano surveys, every feature comes standard with 2 questions:

• If you had (feature), how do you feel? — Functional positive question
• If you didn’t have (feature), how do you feel? — Dysfunctional negative question

With the identical responses:

• I like it
• I expect it
• I’m neutral
• I can tolerate it
• I dislike it

All the tested features should be well described and ideally complemented with a picture, video, or prototype. Your users should get a clear idea of how the feature will impact their usage. Use the concepts they’re already familiar with or they can easily understand. So, rather than asking: “If your phone had 3 400 mAh battery capacity, how do you feel?” which might be too technical and unintelligible for a mainstream audience, you can ask: “If your phone could run 12 h on one battery charge, how do you feel?”

“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”– W. Edwards Deming

It's possible to also include the third question on the importance of the feature. If more features end with the same results, the importance dimension can help you to decide. If you need to get some extra input on presented features, you can also include a fourth optional question with open feedback:

• How important is having (feature) for you?
• Do you have any feedback on (feature)?

This important question usually comes with the simple 5-point Likert scale: from “Not at all important” to “Extremely important,” while the feedback question should be open-ended. Sometimes, it leads to an additional interview, so don’t forget to ask for emails at the end.

Step 3: Analysing The Results

You’re already in the process of data collection and you might ask how many respondents you need. From my experience, for B2C oriented products, responses from around 50 participants from a homogenous segment can show clear trends and with 100+ participants, you get a good certainty of statistical significance. If you’re B2B oriented, responses from tens of customers will give you a great overview.

For the analysis, I use 3 simple methods that give you a Kano category for each feature, show the relations to the other features, and their potential impact on satisfaction. You can also use a calculation sheet made by Alexey Kartashev, but I strongly recommend to go through the methods and understand how it’s calculated and what the result means.

I. Discrete Analysis

The first step of the analysis is sorting all the responses into the Kano groups based on your participants‘ responses on both positive and negative questions. Use the categorization table for that purpose. E.g. if the user replies that she’d like to have some feature, but at the same time she wouldn’t mind if the feature is missing, then the feature belongs to the category of delighters.

Answers that indicate that a respondent would like to have a feature, but also like the idea of not having the feature should be categorized as a Questionable. It signifies an incorrect understanding or a reckless answering process. In the case of more questionable answers, consider improving and repeating the survey. The results would be most likely flawed.

Then, calculate the number of times when a feature was defined as a particular category. The highest consensus defines its overall category.

If one feature has the same count for more categories, pick the overall category based on the following rule:

II. Continuous Analysis

While discrete analysis gives you a quick overview of feature categories, it also lacks details, such as the opinions of respondents who fell under non-selected categories, and the feature relation with the other features. Continuous analysis, presented by Bill DuMouchel comes with the solution and helps to display all features in an easily understandable chart.

The first step is to assign a numeric value to each answer based on its impact on satisfaction. For that purpose, use the following key:

After that, you can average the functional values and dysfunctional values for each feature which gives you x and y coordinates in the evaluation table. Most of your features will probably get to the top right quadrant and this is also where you start with your prioritization. If your questionnaire contains the important question, simply use a bubble chart with an extra dimension to display the importance.

III. Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction Coefficients

A satisfaction coefficient is a number between 0 and 1, which indicates how strong the impact on satisfaction is if a particular feature is present. Similarly, the dissatisfaction coefficient shows how strongly omitting a particular feature would influence overall dissatisfaction. You can simply calculate both coefficients using the following formula.

When you have the calculation done, I suggest that you sort all the examined features based on coefficients in the graph. It will help you visualize their relative relations and see what features have the biggest impact on happiness when present and what features have the biggest impact on unhappiness when missing.

Step 4: Using The Results

The analysis phase should help you to see which features are considered important by your customers and what category they belong to.

1. No doubt, you have to start with the Mandatory requirements, satisfying the basic customer needs. Without their presence, your product can hardly compete in its category and your customers simply wouldn’t want to use it.
2. When these are resolved, you can move on to Performance features because these are the features that help you to differentiate your product.
3. Even with a tight budget, always make room for some delighters. They give your product a feel that you care about your users more than others. Delighters represent an opportunity to stand out, but they can’t come at the expense of Must-haves.

End

There is no perfect way for feature prioritizing and each method comes with its strengths and weaknesses. From my point of view, the biggest value of the Kano model is getting rid of your team’s emotions and assumptions. Instead of plain opinions, you can decide based on evidence and data. Ideally, it should help you to deliver optimal customer needs satisfaction with your product or service and keep your customers coming back.

While the Kano model provides great insights into the dynamics of customer needs, there still will be many hard decisions and experiments you’ll have to undergo on your way to an awesome product. If I’d paraphrase Jeff Patton: At the end of the day, you shouldn’t just strive to sort a list of features — your job is to create a product that changes the world.

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It might seem like a trivial side-job, but user research is actually one of the most important activities for you to partake in. With a UX survey, you can find desired features which your customers miss, or identify unnecessary ones. Based on UX Survey, you make important decisions and plan your roadmap.

“Everything starts with the customer.” –June Martin

You definitely shouldn’t underestimate UX Survey. In this article, I focus on one of many research methods that are often chosen for its simplicity and velocity but, unfortunately, it’s often messed up. Let’s take a look at what this particular UX Survey method is all about, and the 7 tips for how to ensure that it’s conducted smoothly.

Here are 7 tips for an effective UX survey result:

1. Do Not Conduct A Questionnaire Survey

I really mean it. Do not conduct a questionnaire survey just for the sake of it. There has already been too much time wasted of poor people filling in bad questionnaires which nobody actually evaluates, and if they do, they evaluate it with meaningless results. Before you send out another questionnaire, think about following 3 questions:

Couldn’t you get the data somewhere else? If your UX survey is focused on general topics or demographic facts, there might already be some available results from other research. Do the secondary UX survey first and try to find your answers there. Also, don’t underestimate your analytical tools and previously conducted UX surveys.

Is the questionnaire an appropriate form of the UX survey? There are many UX survey methods out there such as questionnaires, interviews, observations, experimentation, focus groups, etc. When choosing the right method, think about the time that it will take, the data that you can obtain, and the richness of information that you hope to receive.

Will you really use the UX survey results? If you’re not sure just how you will utilize obtained data or what steps will be taken based on the result, then please save your time and the time of your respondents. Making a survey with no plan as to what to do with the data doesn’t make any sense!

2. Define The Goal of Your UX Survey

The most important activity before you actually start writing questions for your questionnaire is to set your goal. What do you want to achieve with your research and what decision will you make based on it? Without a clearly stated goal, it’s very difficult to design proper questions, find the right audience, and identify the right form for your UX Survey. Defining the meaning of your research might lead to a completely different form than a questionnaire. For instance, it could be more beneficial to use an interview, A/B test, or usability testing,...

Whether your goal is to validate your hypothesis, get users’ feedback on your product, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), or come up with new ideas, make sure you know what you need to find it all out.

If you have an idea but do not have enough resources to test or build the entire product, you can check out our article on building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

3. Ask Good Questions

Now, when you have defined what you want to accomplish, it’s time to write questions that will help you to achieve it. Don’t underestimate the ways in which you ask the question or its form. A poorly posed question can result in the wrong conclusions being drawn and it could even negatively affect your business. There are a few general principles which you should have on your mind while writing your questions:

• Ask simple questions. Difficult concepts and long questions are hard to understand. They might result in the churn of your respondents.
• Be specific and don’t beat around the bush.
• Always ask only about your respondent’s opinion. Don’t ask what others think.

• Don’t use hypothetical questions like “what would you do if…”. On hypothetical question, you’ll only get a hypothetical answer.
• Have an option for everybody. If you’re not sure whether you listed all options, use an “other” option with an empty input field.

• Avoid suggestive questions. Your goal with a UX Survey is to find out the truth. Not to confirm your previously existing beliefs or biases.

• Avoid sensitive topics if not necessary. Touching God, politics, partnerships, multi-gender lifestyles, family, or income might result in an unpleasant situation.
• If possible avoid open questions. They're hard to analyze often lead to no conclusion. I'm always trying to have at least meritory questions closed.
• Don't change scale orientation. In case more questions are utilizing a Likert scale or other rating scales, don't change the scale direction. People get easily confused.

4. Remove All Unnecessary Questions

When you have a decent set of questions, it’s about time to throw away the useless ones. Every question in your survey should contribute to the goal that you’ve set at the beginning. Many times when I’m asked to give feedback for a UX survey, and I ask for the purpose of each question, I get the following reply: “Hmm, I was just interested in it.” or “I saw a similar survey and this question was on it… So I added it.”

None of these are a good reason to have a question in your survey. If the question does not help you get closer to your goal, it has no business being in your UX survey. Every extra irrelevant question simply lowers the chance of completion for the participants of your questionnaire.

The impact of the number of questions on the average completion rate. [5]

5. Ask The Right Question In The Right Moment

It’s important not only to ask good questions but to also ask them in the right moment. Think about your questionnaire like any other interface/system in which a user interacts with it. When you first meet with your new neighbor, “What’s your salary?” certainly isn’t the first question that comes out of your mouth. In fact, without a valid reason, there’s a good chance that you might never find yourself asking that question at all!

When it comes to a questionnaire, I’m always trying to start with the most interesting question to grab the respondent’s attention. It’s also called a hook question. After this hook question, you might continue with the rest of the key questions that are necessary for the validation of your hypothesis. It helps when you order the questions in a logical groups or in a way the tell a story.

The most critical questions should come with a control question to help validate whether or not the user is consistent in their opinions. It’s well known that people are notoriously bad at telling the truth.

Always visible progress bar while completing UX survey on typeform.com

Throughout the survey, you’re building trust and you’re forging a relationship with your respondent. The most sensitive and “boring” questions (like screening and demographics) should be placed right at the end of the questionnaire. Don’t forget to ask for each user’s email address. It’ll help you verify that a user is a real person and it’ll provide you with a contact in the event that you need to clarify some responses or if you want to invite the user for an additional interview.

6. Find The Right audience

The respondents of your survey should always be determined to answer by the survey objectives. When you’re examining eating habits of primary school children in eastern Europe, it doesn’t make sense to ask mid-age male adults from Asia. There are many ways to find an audience for your UX survey. I’ll mention 3 which worked best for me in the past and 1 that brought me very poor results.

✅ Ask Your Own Users

If you already have a product with a user base, don’t hesitate to ask them to participate in research. There isn’t a better and more relevant audience! Moreover, people love to occasionally contribute to the development of a product they like and your brand benefits from it because your customers see that you care about their opinions.

✅ Forums and Facebook Groups

If you’re starting a new product/service and don’t have customers yet, Facebook groups and forums might serve as a good starting point. Find groups which are thematically close to your business and survey their members. Before posting any questionnaire, always talk to the moderator first! Otherwise, you might violate their terms and damage your brand.

✅ Fake Door Landing Pages

When your product/service is not on the market yet or if you want introduce a new feature for a different audience than your current users, you can try to obtain your respondents through Fake Door Landing Pages. Create a one-page site that briefly describes your new business and asks visitors for their email addresses. Run a Facebook campaign to promote this page to your target audience. Then, survey those people.

The first and foremost important reason for the development of any new product is offering new value to the customer. For that, you have to clearly understand your customer needs and the best way to identify their monumental pain point is by using the kano model.

❌ Don’t Buy Research Panel Users

Remember, real insights come from real consumers. While buying panel users might seem easy, the results are often not based on reality. Participants recruited from these agencies in many cases do not fit the right target group and/or tend to fill the form in a hurry just to get the promised reward.

Also, do not forget to calculate how many responses you need to ensure that your findings are statistically significant. This article might help you calculate your sample size.

7. Pre-test Your UX Survey

Now, when you have prepared a set of questions that will help you to accomplish your research goal and you know who your respondents will be, my last tip is to pre-test your survey before you send it out to all of your potential respondents.

Send it to a few people, maybe your colleagues, friends or family. You will not count their responses into the results, but they will help you to validate that all of the included questions are understandable, that your survey doesn’t contain any unclear answer choices, and that the UX survey doesn’t lead to a dead end. It’s better to look awkward in front of a few friends than to end up with useless survey results.

Good luck with your UX survey!

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In 2018, global consumer spend in both Apple‘s App Store and Google Play was more than $100B, and it’s going to surpass $120B in 2019. It’s actually growing 5x faster than the overall global economy. What’s more, in-app purchases and subscription-based apps are becoming standard amongst the mainstream population. Almost 50% of US millennials made at least 5 in-app purchases last year, and when it comes to the most grossing apps, the TOP-5 of them are monetized through a subscription-based model, where users continuously shell out money. [1][2]

It’s safe to say that people are willing to spend their money on (and in) mobile apps of all kinds, and app makers are doing their best to show-off features and optimize conversion funnels. And as it turns out, the subscription model is one of the safest ways how to survive as a software company. In this article, I will share with you a few techniques that helped companies I worked with to increase their subscription-based revenue.

Worldwide App Store Consumer Spend in USD (Billions) [1]

There are 2 ways to increase the revenue of your subscription-based app:

1. Growing the number of Subscribers

The most important metrics for your sales funnel and growing your subscribers are the sales page conversion, install to trial conversion, the average time from install to trial, and trial to paid conversion. Also, pay attention to your other product metrics — e.g. aggressive in-app communications might have a negative effect on your user retention, even though it slightly increases the conversion to trial.

When you’re making any type of change in your conversion funnel, always measure the impact and evaluate exactly how each adjustment influenced your metrics. For sales funnel experiments, I’d recommend using A/B tests because they help to ensure that there is a level playing field for every variant. This will help to minimize any external influences that could skew your results. In addition, always test just one change at a time to help pinpoint the specific changes that had an effect.

In-App Sales Page

For app monetization, the in-app sales page is a centrepiece and it’s certainly the most important part of your in-app purchase funnel because it leaves the biggest impact on your sales numbers. That’s why I start here, and you should too.

The key to selling your product is to first understand your customer needs and second, explain how your product can solve them. The most effective way for learning your customer's needs is to use the Kano Model. When you know it, clearly state it in 3–4 points. Avoid providing too much information; people are sick of long reads. Tell your users why they should purchase your subscription and give them information on how it will improve their experience instead of just providing the list of features that they’re buying. Focus on the positives — users pay for better service, not the removal of annoying features.

For Spendee, which is one of the apps we build at Cleevio, just a clear explanation of USP and explicit trial statements helped them improve the sign up to start trial conversion for 20%.

In the event that your app offers more than one subscription-based plan, make sure that you’ve clearly explained the differences between each and told your users all about the individual benefits and limitations (if any) of each model. As William Hick famously found, the more choices you present your users with, the longer it takes them to reach a decision on which one to interact with. If your app contains more than 2–3 different subscription plans, think about simplification. Here is a case study on how Groove increased its trial signups by 358% by simplifying its pricing.

While an annual plan might be great for your cash flow and revenue predictability, such a long commitment might seem scary to your customers who still don’t know your app very well just yet. At first, it might be beneficial to provide them with additional billing options (monthly or quarterly) and highlight how much they can save on the yearly option. Another way to reduce the initial friction is through introductory offers.

Introductory Offers

The purchase decision-making process is difficult, and it‘s often guided by irrational thinking and emotions. Introductory offers are a great way to mitigate insecurity and give your users an extra logical argument for trying your product. With both Apple‘s App Store and Google Play, you have basically 2 options: Free Trial and Introductory Pricing.

With Free Trial, you offer your customers a short period of time (typically 3, 7, or 14 days) when they can test all the subscription features for free. A premium first-time experience helps to engage people and hook them.

Introductory Pricing allows you to present a special pricing offer at the beginning of the subscription-based cycle (e.g. first 3 months for $0.99, then $2.99/month). This offer might be especially useful if your customers need more time to understand the value of the paid plan that you’re looking for them to purchase. In addition, it might also attract early price-sensitive customers, who will be enticed to purchase your app through an introductory price first. The goal is to entice them to purchase the subscription after using and enjoying the features of your app.

• More about Apple App Store Introductory offers
• More about Google Play Store Introductory offers

Great introductory offer examples from Sleepzy, 30 Day Fitness, and Runtastic.

Territorial Pricing

The Law of demand states that when a product decreases in price, it leads to an increase in demand. Elasticity describes just how big this increase in demand is. The important learning lesson to take away here is that if the demand is like a piece of elastic, a relatively small drop in price can multiply the demand, and result in bigger revenue. [4]

Elasticity depends on many variables. One of them is purchasing power parity in a particular country. If you provide the same price for your subscription-based app all around the world, you might compete with a cup of coffee in one country, while in other countries, people survive a few days for that amount of money.

Try several price experiments in different countries and figure out what your price elasticity looks like in each of them. In some countries like the US, Australia, or some north European countries, the price for your subscription-based service might be 2–3x higher without any significant drop in units sold. On the other hand, countries like India, Thailand, or eastern European countries might generate much higher total revenue if the price of your app shrinks by about half.

Average purchasing power parity by country (GDP per capita, Int.$) [9].

Make The Process Effortless

Don’t expect your users to search for the in-app purchases. It’s always best to present them with your subscription-based plan as soon as possible and ask them to subscribe. Some good options would be to present them with a subscription introduction after they start using the app, place a persistent “subscribe” button that remains visible on the home screen, or design a subscription section in an account or app settings menu. In my experience, the offers that appear in the moment when a user shows interest in a premium feature often generate great conversion rates.

Reduce the friction and all unnecessary steps needed to subscribe. The subscription flow should be as straightforward as possible. All additional user information (demographic info, reasons for use, etc.) might be obtained later. Based on Apple’s research, subscription-based flow with 3 clicks has around a 61% success ratio. On the other hand, a 4-click flow already drops to 48%, and long flows with more than 8 clicks are actually completed only by around 7% of all users.

2.  Retain Subscribers

Acquiring a new subscriber is just one part of the journey when it comes to subscription-based optimization. The other equally important part is retaining subscribers. With a high churn rate, it’s extremely difficult to establish a sufficient Monthly Recurring Revenue. It’s 5x more expensive to acquire a new customer, as to retain an existing one. At the same time, increasing paying customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25–95%. [5]

“It’s 5x more expensive to acquire a new customer, as to retain an existing one.”

The important metrics for your retention strategy are your day-1 retention rates, as well as the retention rates of paying users between months 1–3 after launch, the average revenue per user / per paying user, and user lifetime value. It’s also important to care about your other product metrics, like how users interact with paid features, how much time they spend in your app, how strong your competitive advantage is, and your overall product experience. Also pay attention to your customers‘ satisfaction rate and app reviews.

While the product itself has the biggest impact on retention and it’s certainly a real challenge to create a truly engaging product, there are certain ways to reduce the churn rate of your paying customers. There are 2 kinds of churn: voluntary (when your customer consciously cancels the subscription) and involuntary (when the subscription is interrupted due to other circumstances).

Involuntary Churned Subscribers

When a new subscription-based period occurs for your customers, there is a slight chance for the payment to be declined. It’s mainly caused by outdated payment information, or simply because the bank declined the transaction. In my experience, around 20% of transactions in the EMEIA region and around 10% worldwide are declined each month for that reason.

To prevent involuntary churn caused by payment processing issues, both Apple‘s App Store and Google Play allow developers to set up a grace period. It simply gives your subscribers some extra time (typically 3–7 days) to update their billing information and/or the bank to process the transaction. During the grace period, your customer can still use all the subscription-based features and their experience is not compromised. Google claims that developers who use a grace period see a 57% higher recovery rate from renewal declines.

Number of days in grace period after which the subscription was recovered

Take action and help your customers resolve the issue. With realtime server notifications, you can immediately gain access to the information that someone gets during their grace period and begin a helpful dialog using in-app messaging or notifications. Explain the situation and offer the deep-link to account settings where that particular user can update their billing information.

Voluntary Churned Subscribers

The best way to get back voluntary churned subscribers is to discover the reason for cancelation and then fix it. It might be anything from technical issues, price level, or bad customer support, to features fits and bad overall app experience. Without fixing the major issues, you’ll probably never be able to retain a significant part of your new subscribers.

Find out the major issues of your app by sending out a cancelation questionnaire to users who churned. The insights from this survey will help you create a strategy to retain your current customers. For your Play Store customers, you get a basic survey for free and you’ll find results in your Play Console. In the case of App Store customers, you’ll have to manage it by yourself. Here are some tips on how to get the most out of exit surveys.

For those subscribers who are leaving because of the subscription cost, if they found an alternative, or if they simply don’t use the app enough, a win-back strategy might be worth it to try. Both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store have tools that allow you to create a special price offer for those users who churned recently. Your goal shouldn’t be to win-back all churned customers; in fact, it should only be to win back all profitable customers. Find out who they are and personalize the communication based on the features they use and might miss.

A great example of Win-back Offers from Noted, and HoppyGo which is an app build at Cleevio.

Conclusion

With the enormous growth rate of mobile app industry revenue in past years, subscriptions-based apps are a great opportunity to grow your app’s business. Both the App Store and Play Store offer features that can help you to optimize your retention funnel and acquisition strategy.

However, the decision is up to you. Start with your product’s retention — it’s much cheaper to retain a customer than acquire a new one. Then continue with the low hanging fruit — small adjustments with the biggest potential to impact your revenue. Don’t forget to document each attempt and evaluate your results. And most importantly, don’t give up. Sometimes it needs dozens of experiments before you find the gold vein.

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In a trial-and-error world, the one who can find errors the fastest is the one who wins. Some people call this approach “fail fast”. Eric Ries called it Lean, while Kent Beck and other software developers called it Agile.

Whatever you call it, the point is to find out which of your assumptions regarding the product are wrong by getting feedback from real users as quickly as possible.

The agile methodology presupposes dividing the product development into sprints, which allows to reduce risks and respond to required changes quickly.

Because the agile methodology is built around the idea of ​​an iterative process based on customer feedback, the MVP plays a central role in agile development.

Building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) helps to deliver a new product with sufficient features to satisfy early adopters, which allows getting valuable feedback, and building a complete set of features later on.

The MVP concept is mostly practiced in the software industry to check the viability of the product. If you looking for a company to build the MVP for you, check out this software development comany.

What is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and why do we use Agile?

The majority of the software today is developed using Agile methodology. In the Agile environment, you'll often hear the phrase minimum viable product (MVP).

This term simply means: the most minimally featured thing you can build that will address the opportunity well enough for most of your target customers and validate your market and product.

In other words, if you were to think about the core function you're trying to let customers accomplish, what's the simplest product you can build that lets them achieve that goal?

For example, let's say you went back in time and were working on the first version of an app for a newspaper. The core function of an app would be informing its readership. That is why the easiest product you could build would be a list of news headlines and a button to refresh.

Again, the key to successful MVP is focusing on the core value that the app provides, which is fresh news, rather than spending your time building additional features of the app.

Note that MVP doesn't mean the product should be bad. The truth is that it should be very good at what it does, but it should focus on doing only a few core functions.

In a nutshell, the main characteristics of MVP are:

• It has enough value that people are willing to use it or buy it initially
• It demonstrates enough future benefits to retain early adopters
• It provides a feedback loop to guide future development

Why should you use an Agile methodology to develop the MVP?

A key differentiator between Agile and other methodologies is that Agile leverages MVPs. With an Agile approach, you build the simplest thing you can, gather data about how customers use it, and then refine the product if needed.

This will let you work quite effectively, building only the features customers want and will use rather than wasting time building things customers don't care about.

Contrast this with non-MVP-based approaches to product development. Using other approaches, you may end up spending lots of time trying to build the “perfect” product with every feature you can imagine, but once it's out in the real world you discover that customers don't use half the features you thought they would.

Here is the agile minimum viable product (MVP) example:

Source: Dropbox

Drew Houston - the CEO of Dropbox, decided to create an MVP for the cloud-storage startup in the form of video.

They made an explainer video and shared it with their network to gauge people's reactions. The 3-minute video explained what the Dropbox is and demonstrated how it would help people.

After releasing the video, the company increased signups from 5,000 people to 75,000 overnight for the "early access" - all of this without having an actual product.

So the main benefits of building the MVP (agile) are:

• Initial Consumer Research

As faster the product reaches out to the target user, the sooner you get the feedback and analyze the customer's challenges or preferences. If the users do not find your MVP valuable, you have space to pivot and test the other value propositions.

Or, if the opposite is true, you'll be sure that developed features are useful for target clients, so you can move forward. In the worst-case scenario, you can freeze the project to cut your losses.

• Testing Stage

The biggest benefit of developing an MVP is that it allows testing various business models and concepts.

By offering the core set of functions rather than a feature-heavy product, you can verify if their product concept resonates with your business model, providing an opportunity to change a product’s direction based on findings.

Unlike feature-heavy products, when the MVP is launched, you will have the ability to identify what types of social groups are the most active users, how they interact with the product, and how you can monetize it.

• Cost Efficiency

The quality products are the result of years of development, with an appropriate price tag. But because these products were created iteratively over a longer period, the cost is spread over time.

The MVP approach also helps to save by preventing the product from becoming over complicated. As the product starts getting more traction and gathering more information regarding the direction the product is moving to, you can increase or reduce your investments.

If you're interested to learn more about Agile and SCRUM methodologies, we recommend to you that you check out this articlefrom the SCRUM Institute about how to become a SCRUM master in a detailed step-by-step process. They also offer the most popular, and the most economical Scrum Certification Programs globally.

The Process of Building the MVP (Agile)

Now, once you know what is an MVP, why it is used in Agile, and what are the benefits of it, let's have a look at the 6 steps required for building an MVP.

Step #1: Identify What Problem You’re Solving and For Whom

When developing a version of new products most people aren’t sufficiently rigorous in defining the problems they’re attempting to solve and articulating why those issues are important. Without this process, the product may miss opportunities and waste resources. That is why you need to become better at asking the right questions so that they tackle the right problems.

Take a look at your product idea and ask yourself:

• Who’s your target audience?

If you get stuck at this stage, try to identify your personal challenges. Is there anything you would be able to do better if you had the right tool?

• Why does your target audience need this product?

This will help you identify the main goal of your product and the solution to your potential customers’ needs.

• In what situation would they use it?

Source: Metabeta

Note: In the process of identifying the answers to the questions above it is important to keep everything real and do time and cost estimates in addition.

Step #2: Analyze Your Competitors

As soon as you figured out what problem you are solving, it’s time to see how other companies are solving this issue – or at least trying to solve it. At this point, it is obvious that you have to conduct a competitor analysisif there are similar products on the market.

You should also keep in mind that even if you don’t think you have any direct competitors, your faith in the uniqueness of your product will ground for confidently bringing your product to the market.

Step #3: Define The User Flow, Wireframe & Design

Defining the user flow for your future product involves you focusing directly on your primary goal. In order to define the main user flow, we should first define the process stages which is actually easy because all you need to do is explain the steps required to reach the primary goal of your product.

At this point, you shouldn’t think about features – but should focus on basic tasks such as types of goals that your end users have when they use your product, their expectations, etc.

Once you’re done with defining the user flow, you can move on to wireframing, which is simply an illustration of a webpage or an app. A wireframe is a layout that articulates what kind of interface elements will find a place on important pages.

Wireframing Example:

Designing the User Interface (UI) brings together concepts from interaction design, visual design, and information architecture. Here, you should capitalize on what you learned in the previous phases in order to produce an experience that will surprise and delight the end-user.

Here at Cleevio, when we have the first prototype ready (usually clickable mock-up) we do user testing. User testing is essential to the success of the new app. When we have the results of user testing ready we iterate the wireframes and re-test them on the users.

After the wireframes are tested you should move on to the design phase which should be different for each platform (iOS, Android, Web,...).

Step #4: Analyse Your Features

Did you know that more than 45% of features built-in software products are rarely or never used?

Now that you’ve created your user flow, you can start creating a more detailed list of features for each particular stage, but keeping the statistics in mind.

Once you’ve laid out your features for each stage, you will need to prioritize them. What is the most important action you want your users to complete? This will be your main feature.

One of the feature prioritization methods is MoSCoW which is used to decide which functions to complete first, which must come later and which to exclude. Another technique used for measuring the necessity of the features is based on the business value (time to develop vs. nice to have vs. costs)

Source: ProductPlan

Step #5: Development & Testing

Now that you know the features of your minimum viable product (MVP), it’s time to put them to practice. Moving to the development stage, you need to test your product and work to improve its quality.

After approval of the Wireframes, you should start working on the setup architecture, database and start developing API, Administration, and all back-end.

Alpha and beta testing can help here as some of the most popular ways to test a product’s performance in different scenarios. Make sure to align the testing and only make the changes that affect the entire user experience.

As standard, you should implement the following tests in a controlled environment before the app is launched:

• Functionality Testing
• Usability testing
• Compatibility testing
• Crowd Testing
• Interface Testing
• Performance Testing
• Security testing

During the development process, you should continuously test all the implemented features.

For example, here at Cleevio, we build mobile apps, and releases of beta builds are uploaded to Google alpha/beta testing and to Apple's TestFlight. Internal test builds are in Appcenter (an official tool by Microsoft).

When the "release candidate" (a product that's ready for the market) is ready we do open or closed beta testing, where we invite as many relevant users into the beta test program and we gather feedback on functionality and bugs.

Step #6: Iteratively get to product-market fit or fail

If you validate the MVP, you can start looking at your product’s scope and expand. At this point, you either raise startup capital to help you get to market faster or fail.

For a mobile app, we usually do a “soft launch” when we release the MVP to AppStore and Google Play but don't encourage any marketing of the app at this time.

As the app is getting more users some bugs can pop and we are sure to fix everything ASAP. Usually, we release new builds every other day. Once the app is stable and we have a crash-free users rate over 99.9%, we recommend to start with marketing and acquire more users.

Data is really important and that's why we recommend monitoring user's behavior with Mixpanel or Google Firebase analytics so that we can understand how users are really using the app.

The development of the product is never finished. Very important is to ask for the user's feedback and iterate the product. When we have more users we perform A / B testing to be able to test various solutions and increase user engagement.

Source: ProductPlan

Conclusion

At Cleevio we've developed over 120 MVPs in the past 10 years so we have enough experience under our belt, to know which MVPs scale and which burn and die.

We know that it's a bit overwhelming to prepare a roadmap, documentation, or wireframes for your MVP idea so feel free to reach out to us and we'd be happy to offer you some free advice.

For a consulting call about your MVP email us at hello@cleevio.com .

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