@wcoolsWhen comparing products or services, one important factor in choosing which solution to go for is trust. We know we are looking for certain trust signals before buying services as consumers ourselves, so we need to make sure that as makers we address those same questions and concerns too!
This is especially true for the kind of product we’re building. It’s not hard to come up with concerns potential customers might have. With any SaaS product you want to know it will remain online, your data is secure, people care about your privacy, and so on. Especially when trying out a new product from a new startup, you want to make sure it sticks around.
The “close tab” button is your biggest enemy, and just the tiniest concern you don’t address can cause people to not even give it a try. As I wrote before, people are going to look for answers to these concerns anyway. So you can either address them yourself, or people will leave your site, look for answers on sites you don’t control (and maybe come back, who knows). You might think people will take the effort to email you if they need an answer, but it’s much easier to “close tab” and look for something else.
Luckily, addressing most of these signals really don’t cost a lot of time:
About page
This seems too obvious to even list here, but just really, just mention something about you or your team somewhere. When launching your MVP, you really don’t need to publish a complete biography. Even something like a link to your Twitter profile will be enough. Software is so anonymous, and is literally written by folks on laptops on different sides of the planet these days. People like to not just buy something, but from someone (especially for B2B, buying something when it says just [email protected] in the footer is going to be a harder sale).
Social media/online presence
This is actually a mistake we’ve made for our first product. We noticed that when we didn’t have an easy way for people to find recent activity about us online, they seemed worried about the product being abandoned. I don’t have sufficient data for this to claim any statistical significance, but whenever we didn’t tweet for a while on our company twitter (which we link to in the footer of the product’s website), it seemed like we somehow converted less people.
We even had people contact us asking if the product was abandoned, because they couldn’t find updates (on our Twitter or other social media, probably). And this was just after we had completely redesigned the product a few months before and we were very happy with how polished the product was now. Ouch. But it makes sense in a way, people have probably been burned before by some startup with poor support, so it’s just another trust signal.
Fast support
We always aim to answer any support emails really quickly. This is related to software being very anonymous, and it just shows there are actual humans involved and that we really care (and good support is a USP too!)
Security/privacy policy & GDPR
Especially with SaaS products, you want to make sure customers can see you care about their data. More than anything, these just show you’ve put thought in it at all. And next to it being the right thing to do, some things are simply required, for example GDPR compliance.
This is probably a topic for another post, but especially when launching your very first version to validate an idea, it doesn’t need to be anything super complicated. It already helps a lot to have a nice FAQ-style page to address the biggest concerns. How will you handle cancelations, data erasure, data export, how do you store your data and so on.
Better than trust
Speaking of security, ideally you wouldn’t need to trust a company much at all. In the case of Thymer for example, we would really like to look into end-to-end encryption (E2EE) at some point. We will launch with encryption in transit and encryption at rest from the start, but I don’t think we’ll have time for E2EE in our very first version. We can’t build everything at once, but it’s good to think about which features can address the largest concerns for not signing up first.
Testimonials
This isn’t possible on day 0 with zero users, but as soon as you have some users, ask them how they like the product and whether you can add their reply to your website. Related to this, one of the things people will usually look for is reviews for your product. Make sure you reply in those places when people have questions. You can even create your own “X reviews” page and rank for that, so you can guide people to different reviews and include your own support structures when they have questions.
Bugs
Every product is going to have some bugs and glitches, that’s hard to avoid. Some bugs are so embarrassing however, it just signals you don’t care at all. Of course you won’t have infinite resources to make everything perfect, but prioritize fixing critical flaws. Some bugs there’s just no coming back from. Fix it or people will stop trusting your product.
