Hey, Happy Sunday –
Blink and you’ve already missed it.
The trend to catch onto, wave to fundraise, or shot at making your product feel alive in culture.
Timing is everything. Companies that win can keep up with how fast everything moves.
How can you keep pace and make the right product bets? Let’s say you made a wrong bet — here’s a fix you’ll need to make.
It’s also harder than ever to know how customers will respond to campaigns or product updates in both B2B and B2C.
Do you go edgy and viral at the risk of backlash? Play it safe and risk irrelevance or retaining users to a stronger competitor? Is there even a middle ground?
You need to build yourself an edge by listening to your customers.
Why? Because how, where and why you listen to your customers will help you nail growth.
People are loud. They are annoying, noisy, but they’re also the clearest signal you’ve got. You’ll never please everyone, but you can focus on the right voices and turn that feedback into real growth.
Today, I’ll walk you through exactly how you should listen to your customers, where you can find buried signals, and turn this into true product evolution across B2B and B2C.
1. Know Who’s Talking to You
As a CMO at a software company, it’s true that most of the real-time product feedback comes online, in writing.
I know the same is true for my CEO and CMO friends.
It’s not easy to always know who is talking to you. But, it’s critical.
You need to distinguish between true product feedback, nonsense rants, and loyal customers who feel a sense of ownership over your company.
How do you know when you’re reading an anon username if someone is a real customer, bot, or person who wants to spread bad vibes and complain?
Here are a few quick ways to find out:
What is the account like? Do they have other posts/info?
Does their username map back to a customer?
Can you DM them and ask?
Are they part of a company you’ve worked with? (B2B)
Before you take any feedback, know who you’re talking to.
2. How to Find Buried Signals
If you’re only reading product reviews or user surveys, you’re driving blind. You need to look in the hidden places I’m about to show you.
At a high-level, I love doing a deep online stalk about my brand and vertical. I go through comments about anything in my industry as a way to stack feedback, spot trends and uncover user challenges.
You can find the best feedback in the weirdest places.
You should think about it from the POV of when you’re a customer for someone else’s brand. Where would you go to write a review, connect with a community, complain, etc.?
Example: If I was building a recruiting software or was a Head of Ops, I would be stalking r/overemployed all the time to keep a pulse on what makes people satisfied at work, or wanting more. So much more, that they stack multiple jobs.
Favorite random places to find feedback and/or pulse check industry energy:
Industry related meme pages
Comments on competitor ads (facebook usually skews older for comments, but very honest, and usually shows leaky parts of the funnel)
Tiktok comments
Tiktok search – if you start to search something and use an industry keyword, it will populate a list of related things other people are searching for.
Then, go through these videos and just down a rabbit hole and see what’s up.
Comments on popular influencers in your vertical
Overlapping topics among nano influencers (influencers w/ 5K-10K followers)
Discord communities about your industry (some companies even have servers for their top users with mods being internal hires)
In 60% of cases, I would actually pick these areas over a written product review.
The best part about the internet is that you no longer need to guess what people are thinking.
They tell you (usually in 150 characters or less, and might even add in an emoji to spice it up).
3. How to Set Up the Feedback Loops with Critical Customers
Can you write a list of your top 20 customers?
If you can’t immediately do this, you’re not close enough to your product. Getting this list together is a good place to start.
If you’re outsourcing this to CX teams without ever reading raw feedback yourself, you should question your priorities as a leader.
If you’re a B2B brand, narrow it down to the in-house champions pushing for your product. Btw, champions alone won’t build a truly successful product. B2B teams need to do this & go deeper by stealing the B2C moves that actually drive PLG.
Here are some hacky ways to set up 24/7 customer feedback loops from real people:
Leverage paid creators for product feedback
I like this because you should get a range of creators who are super in love with your product vs. ones who use it just because you work with them. This allows the feedback to skew from being deep to surface level.
At times, I’m working with 100+ creators/mo. It’s an easy way to get minimum 100 pieces of feedback/mo on my product from new and seasoned users.
Get feedback from super users
My all time favorite for so many reasons. If you grow a relationship with these people, they will champion your product forever.
They can even grow and lead communities growing the superuser fandom
Discord servers
I’ve seen brands across B2B and B2C have huge discord chats moderated by an internal team member for 24/7 access to feedback
This is awesome because when you ship something, you can get immediate replies
It’s also cool because it keeps people hyper-engaged with your product
Grouping these people together also gives them a little community to be part of, and anchors your company in something larger than just the product
Ask active people in Facebook groups related to your vertical
This is the way i scraped 100+ beta users for my first ever software product – by digging through tons of facebook groups, connecting with active users, establishing an internet relationship, and funneling them to test my product AND give me feedback
You need to go find people who are already doing the thing you want (giving feedback, asking questions, writing reviews) + get them to do it for you
4. How to Turn This Feedback into Product Changes
Now that you’ve received a bunch of fun (and not so fun) feedback about what you’re pouring your heart and soul into building, here’s exactly what you should do with it.
But first, take a deep breath.
No one knows your product better than you. And ultimately, you have the power to veto anything (use this power wisely).
Segment the feedback into 3 sections:
Immediate bugs
Cultural brand changes
Feature requests, improvements & long-term product evolution
Then, go through each one.
Immediate Bugs: Squash ASAP, send through proper eng channels to fix.
Contact any users when appropriate to let them know you’re addressing their concern. They’ll let you know if you still don’t get it right (i promise lol).
Cultural Brand Changes: Did you totally miss the mark on a campaign or piece of content? Are you SURE? It’s 100% okay to not satisfy everyone, so gut-check with trusted advisors on this.
If you come to the definite conclusion that your brand missed the mark, then work on a larger long-term vision for the brand and set up the infra to make sure you get there.
NOTE: Brand should have an edge. It’s so competitive rn that you can’t afford not to. If you don’t have an edge, be prepared for an underdog to take your spot with just as good of a product and a stronger voice that appeals to just enough of your target audience to capture something capital-worthy.
Feature Requests, Improvements & Long-Term Product Evolution: Indexing incorrectly on customer feedback is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make. But, since you have to listen to feedback, how can you filter through what actually makes it onto your product roadmap?
There are many ways to go about this, and I find that only the top CMOs, CEOs and product leaders do this correctly.
Doing this incorrectly can lead to detrimental pivots.
Ask yourselves these questions:
Are you building in the right direction? How does this compare to your original vision for the company and why did you pivot this way?
Are your customers retentive to your current product? Would [insert potential product change] dramatically alter this retention or improve your user experience?
Are your competitors offering a similar product feature that is leading them down a path to ultimately crush you?
Will these feature requests and improvements be addressed inside the larger products your building for the long-term? Is there any value in shipping them one-off now?
Although I find myself allergic to anything that seems like an investment banker could say it, I actually happen to find RICE scoring helpful when at these crossroads.
It’s just a simple way to see if you should or shouldn’t build something that your customers may or may not actually care about.
Well, How’d I Do?
Feedback is the baseline of any relationship, product building included.
Whether you’re building in B2B or B2C, if you have a sticky product that’s worth literally anything, your customers will be loud. They will tell you exactly how they feel.
How you index feedback, from industry → customers → product, is critical.
Get it wrong, and it’s one of the most costly mistakes you can make (I’ve seen this firsthand).
Get it right, and you’ll build closer to your customers, faster, and better than the competition on bets that turn into wins.
I hope today’s newsletter showed you interesting, new places to find feedback, how to correctly index on it, and use it carefully as you build your product.
I hope you have a great & productive week. I’m in NYC having the time of my life building. I am so in love with what I do for work and who I'm surrounded by that sometimes it leaves me speechless.
Julia
P.S. If you reached out about connecting recently, I’ve had some good industry friends over to the office – reply if you want to come through in SoHo!
