🗞 What's New: Getting into the minds of your users

What drives people to buy something?

• Knowing the answer to this question can mean the difference between creating a multimillion dollar business, and creating something that no one uses. Below, we dive into the psychology behind purchase decisions to help you answer this question for your own product.
• Have you considered using AI in your cold outreach strategy? This 3 step strategy can help make personalization easier, giving you the best chance to hit the mark!
• Founder Femke van Schoonhoven built a paid community of 200+ designers focused on growth in the design world. Here's how she encourages knowledge sharing within the community and fosters growth, and what she would do differently.

Want to share something with over 110,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🧐 Understanding Why People Use Your Product

from the Growth & Founder Opportunities newsletter by Darko

What drives people to buy something?

In this series, I aim to help you get into the minds of your users to discover what they really want from your product. This will help reduce your likelihood of creating something that people don't consider useful.

When someone talks about product-market fit, they usually mean that the product addresses an important need for your users. But what is a "need?"

All about needs

Let's define a "need." I've found the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) approach to offer a good definition:

Here are some examples of JTBD:

• Find a home for sale.
• Pay a recurring bill.
• Remove a stain from clothing.

For any of the above jobs, you can “hire” various products to get them done.

What people want largely doesn't change over time

Imagine we’re back in 1993, 2003, or 2013. Would people still have a need for the things that I outlined above (finding a home for sale, etc.)? They sure would.

JTBD are relatively stable over time. People will always want to find a suitable partner for a relationship, verify if a potential hire is a criminal, or get a child to be more disciplined.

What changes, however, are the products that help people get those jobs done. To find a suitable partner, first there were newspaper ads. Then, dating agencies. Now, there are online dating sites and apps.

People switched from newspaper ads to dating apps because it helped them accomplish the job of finding a suitable partner in a better way, compared to other existing solutions at the time.

Or, consider the job of listening to music while on the go. First, there were portable tape players, then modern MP3 players, then the iPod, and now, smartphones.

The job, listening to music on the go, didn't change. The products that help people better complete that job did.

Applying this concept to software

So, how is all of this relevant to software?

Your software doesn’t exist to help people get something done. People can already do what they want to do without software; it's just that other ways may be slower, less efficient, or less predictable.

Given enough time and money, you can do anything without software. Think of doing your taxes using tax management software vs. pen and paper!

Most software products exist to help people get something done better, cheaper, or more efficiently than the next best alternative. JTBD are timeless. Here are a few examples of popular software and their main JTBD:

• Basecamp => Manage company projects.
• Generative AI tools (i.e. DALL-E) => Create a nice logo.
• Indie Hackers => Learn how to grow your bootstrapped business.

Before Basecamp, things were done on pen on paper, and so on!

Do you know what people "hire" your SaaS for?

The consequences of not knowing the answer to this question can be brutal. The railroad industry proves this point.

Railroad companies didn't realize that the reason people used railroads was to get from point A to point B in the fastest time possible. As a consequence, railroad companies focused on making trains more comfortable, instead of making them faster.

In other words, railroad companies wrongly focused on the railroad aspect, as opposed to the transportation aspect. (Check out Marketing Myopia by Theodore Levitt to read more about this.)

Many software products make the same mistake: Founders don't understand the real reason, the JTBD, that drives people to use their product.

Discovering why people use your product

1. The questions:

Your users do know what they want, as long as you are asking them the right questions.

If you ask someone a vague question like “What do you need from a project management software?” you will get useless answers. Why? Because you're asking people to do two things at the same time:

• Identify why they use a project management software in the first place.
• Try to invent solutions for you, giving you ideas on how to make your software better.

According to the JTBD framework, we all want to accomplish something. So, when you ask people questions with this in mind, you get much clearer answers on what they want because you're focusing on the solution, rather than focusing on the problem.

Before the microwave was invented, people didn't really know whether they needed a microwave, specifically. What they knew is that they wanted to minimize the time it took to prepare a meal (the JTBD), or minimize the likelihood of overcooking a meal (another JTBD). People understood their problem very clearly, and what they wanted to accomplish. It just so happened that the microwave was the solution to that problem.

2. The situations:

The person-situation debate can be summarized in one sentence:

We are always in a certain situation when buying something. People often take life as it comes, and when they find themselves in a certain context, they start looking for solutions.

Founders and marketers often segment their customers according to demographics, psychographics, and other traits that stay relatively stable over time. Yes, those traits tend to correlate with behavior, but do they actually cause it?

You don’t need research to tell you that purchasing behavior changes more often than demographics. Just take two different neighbors, with two similar demographic profiles, owning two very different types of cars. I’m not saying that you should ignore your customer’s demographic profile. But just view it as a proxy to understanding something more fundamental: The context of the purchase.

I recommend that you switch from grouping people into demographic segments, to grouping them into situational segments. A situational segment is all about context; check out tons of great examples in this article from DePaul University. Each of these situations is caused by specific triggers.

Situational triggers

A situation is a particular point or period of time when something happens. When that something happens, people are prompted to look for solutions.

Take the example of a scuba diving shop that interviewed new customers, and discovered that the majority of them were engaged couples planning their honeymoon. Before these interviews, the shop thought that diving enthusiasts were its main customers. The customers that bought from the shop were at a particular point where something happened in their lives (their engagement and upcoming nuptials) that triggered them to make the purchase.

Do you know what trigger situations people experience that prompt them to seek out your product? The end goal is to identify the temporary situations that cause people to change and buy something new.

Remember that people experience situations, and those situations drive needs (JTBD). Targeting these situational changes is a lot more predictive than targeting strictly based on demographics. What are the trigger events that cause people to buy your products? To find those segments, check out these questions to help you find what happened in people's lives that caused them to come to you.

You may also discover that the people who purchase your product are totally different than who you thought they were. A souvenir shop found that most people purchasing their products were not tourists, but former residents visiting the city. If the shop had invested in marketing without this knowledge, they would have wasted money promoting to the wrong audience.

What causes trigger events?

A trigger event is a change in circumstances that happens briefly.

A balding man may think about re-growing his hair, but may not do anything about it until some event happens, like getting a divorce. That event will start a chain of actions (he’ll get new shampoo, sign up for classes to meet new people, etc.).

A major advantage of focusing on situations is that, unlike personality traits, you can influence them easily.

There are three categories of events that can cause change:

• A major transition: This is a change in people, priorities, or locations. Examples: Change of a CEO, moving to a new location, returning from a trip, getting engaged, purchasing a car.

• Bad experience with a person, product, or service: For instance, a company dramatically changes the product that you use, rendering it much less useful than before.

• Awareness due to an external circumstance: For instance, a recent trend makes you change your hairstyle, or a recent government regulation makes you reconsider pricing.

The important point is that people usually have an urge to do something after experiencing one or more of events related to these categories.

If you liked this article, you'll love part two, where we'll talk more about JTBD, and how to be methodological about finding them!

Do you truly know why users seek out your product? Let's chat!

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Growth & Founder Opportunities for more.

📰 In the News

from the Growth Trends newsletter by Darko

🤩 Facebook's new report shares insight into emerging trends.

🎯 Unlock the full power of audience targeting.

⏲ TikTok has set an automatic one hour screen time limit for teens.

🛩 Key differences between younger and older travel audiences.

🤑 How to make a career pivot without taking a pay cut.

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

🥶 A Three Step B2B Cold Outreach Strategy

by Ferva Bashir

Email marketing is a great way to be seen by your potential clients, but there are so many ways to get it wrong.

Here are my wrongs, and how I made them right!

Warm up the right way

We set up Google domains and emails, but used free auto-warmup sites, which caused my emails to be marked as spam and blacklisted. So, we purchased new domains, and this time, we warmed up ourselves.

I created a method to successfully warm emails. In this method, my team would personally send emails back and forth to good scored emails, from the newly purchased emails. They would start short conversations in them, or copy and paste short articles that they found online. This would go on for 14 days. After 14 days, we would start our email campaign by sending to five email prospects on day one, then increasing by five emails per day, every day.

This method allowed our emails to hit the inbox every time, and got us exciting results!

Target the right audience

We had trouble finding the right audience, as there were many tools and sites to go through. These are examples of our initial responses:

So, we had to do a lot of research. We asked for help on Twitter and Slack, compared all of the features, pricing, and tools, and finally went with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This is how I learned the art of finding the right audience.

Every industry is different. Every offer is different. Some things are just harder to sell, but staying consistent and following up is the key.

Personalize emails

56% of my emails sounded robotic, but I redirected quickly and started crafting personal touches.

I was intentional about not making the first sentence all about me, as the reader didn't really know me yet. So, I would start by praising them.

Each sentence in my emails are purposely designed and written to get the recipient to read the next sentence. The emails are typically 3-4 sentences long. I came across a unique strategy of sending personalized videos in my emails, LinkedIn messages, etc., so I tried it. These videos show LinkedIn profiles and websites of prospects as a background.

I recorded the video once, and used AI to generate multiple videos that change the background to the relevant LinkedIn profile for each video according to each specific prospect. My videos start with "Hello [Name]" in my voice, generated by AI. The AI tool that I use is Hify. Disclaimer: I work there.

My emails look something like this:

This strategy boosted my sales tremendously. I saw a ~76% increase!

Will you implement AI into your cold email strategy? Share below!

Discuss this story.

🚀 The Spector Report

by Josh Spector

I'm sharing growth tips for creative founders! Here's this week's:

It’s not about creating what the masses want. It’s about finding the people who want what you create.

You don’t have to go viral.

You don’t need millions of followers.

You just need to find and connect with your people.

Subscribe to Josh's For The Interested newsletter or I Want To Know podcast for more.

✨ Femke van Schoonhoven's Design Community is Thriving

by Rosie Sherry

For the new Rosieland Community Interview series, we sat down with Femke van Schoonhoven, a product designer, educator, mentor, and founder of the Femke.design community. Femke.design is a community of 200+ designers focused on growth and personal development in the design world.

Let's dive into how Femke found herself in community, what it takes to run it, and lessons for other community professionals!

What is your background?

I’m a product designer working in tech, and I've been teaching design for the last seven years while working full-time. I began by sharing my knowledge through blogging and podcasting, before eventually moving towards an email newsletter and YouTube channel. Now, I run a community of designers, offering live events and coaching.

Community for me came about because I wanted to connect with my audience on a more personal level. It’s hard to engage and connect with comments on a YouTube video, and I wanted to offer more practical, tailored advice. It’s also humbling to introduce people to one another, and facilitate more connections in the industry.

What do you wish you knew before embarking on your community journey?

That communities can evolve! I felt paralyzed when I started my community journey, because I wanted everything to be perfect. I think part of that stems from being a designer. It's the desire to create a good experience. However, my community has grown and evolved over time, flexing to meet new needs. In a way, that’s what makes it special!

What's your business model?

Members can choose between a monthly or annual subscription. I began with just a monthly subscription, and introduced an annual plan a year later, when I was confident that I’d continue running the community long-term. Due to the size of my audience across my platforms, I worried that if I created a free community, I’d have an overwhelming number of people join.

I’d been a member of several communities with thousands of members, and at that scale, it's challenging to connect with others and be vulnerable and authentic. Charging a subscription fee keeps my member numbers low, and also attract folks with enough career experience that the conversations and challenges remain interesting.

I run my community almost exclusively through Superpeer, a fantastic platform that allows me to configure my community settings and integrate with other platforms, like Discord and ConvertKit. I chose Superpeer because I’d already been a customer for years, and I love their focus on creators!

How did you grow your community?

I’m a big advocate for building in public and the slow burn of generating demand. I talked about this community publicly for months before launching it, and that helped build the launch day excitement and hype. I got early feedback, while building demand for launch.

One of my favorite rituals that we do is Design Crit, a monthly live event where members can sign up to bring their work for a design review. They get feedback from me and others in the community. This has worked great for getting members to share their work and facilitate feedback.

I’ve also started to invite community members to join me on livestreams to share a topic they’re interested in, or a story that could help others. For example, we recently had a community member share his story about how he got hired at one of the biggest tech companies.

Sprinkling touchpoints to my community across all my content and platforms creates a funnel where new members trickle in regularly. I link to my community everywhere: My onboarding email, website, YouTube description, and Instagram. Building out those touchpoints is like putting marketing on autopilot.

What would you do differently?

I’d start earlier! I had the idea of starting a community for a year or two before I actually started. I remember taking the Rosieland community building course in April, but it wasn’t until November of that year that I actually launched my community! I had a lot of doubts and fears about getting started.

We are continuing to grow! I’m trying to encourage more knowledge sharing within the community. Maybe we’ll have a conference or meetup in the future, who knows!

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Darko, Ferva Bashir, Josh Spector, and Rosie Sherry for contributing posts. —Channing