Receive feedback from potential users

It’s not so easy to get feedback and opinions from a potential client if you are a small startup. In the case of a large company, it seems to me that the situation is simpler. You can spend money on marketing research. You can communicate with already having customers who acquire, although other, but similar objects or services. In the case of a new startup, there is no client base, there is no money either. And the task arises with maximum efficiency, to try to communicate with those who could potentially become a client and adjust their development if the demand is in some ways at odds with the offer. In other words, identify what needs to be corrected and proposed in order to attract more interest.



I apologize to the readers who are already aware of what OOO “Program Verification LLC” is doing and ask them to skip the next paragraph. But I have to repeat the description for those who do not know about our startup.
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The Program Verification Company LLC is developing a specialized PVS-Studio package for identifying modern varieties of errors in C / C ++ programs. Namely - 64-bit and parallel errors. Detection of defects is based on the method of static analysis of the source code of applications and issuing warnings for those parts of the code where the likelihood of errors is high. I think you will agree that the product is not massive and as a result, the number of reviews about it is not great. And therefore it is extremely important to collect these reviews as much as possible, as it is easy to miss something important.

The idea of ​​electronic spam, we never considered as a serious option to attract attention or attempt to start a conversation. However, for some time we tried to work individually with people who, from our point of view, could show interest in our developments. We searched for such people in social networks, for example, LinkedIn, MyKrug, and wrote personalized letters, taking into account the scope of their activities and interests. Very hard and slow work. It takes a lot of time to search for suitable people, drop out, search for contact information, if it is not listed on the page. It takes a lot of time to adapt the text of the letter for this person. On a single day, one person cannot send more than 10–20 of such targeted emails or messages on a social network.

The result of such actions is zero, or even, perhaps, negative, due to the mass of time spent. Almost no response. People have a very negative attitude to letters and messages, automatically sending them to spam. Fingers on the machine quickly click "remove" than the eye and head have time to understand that the letter is written specifically for him and on the subject of his work. There are units that, for some reason, still decided to read the letter. But I repeat, the number of deleted messages "on the machine" is much higher. As an example, I recall the answer from one line in the spirit: "Do not spam me more, otherwise I will complain to your hoster." And this is for an individual introductory letter in which there were questions about the software library that he developed and the use of 64 bits in it. And no advertising. In general, "the Chukchi is not a reader, the Chukchi is a writer." Dead way.

Do not believe the books, which refers to the personalization of emails. Perhaps 10 years ago it worked. Now is no more. As it is not terrible sound, but if you really want to write, you need to stupidly send spam. Efficiency will be the same zero, but the forces will be spent less. Better yet, do not consider emails seriously.

Well, emails are immediately associated with spam. And what if to send paper letters? Game developers, for example, write that when games require 64 bits and parallelism to come read articles to us and try the product. To people from the scientific community, taken from the lists of various scientific conferences on parallelism, write a letter with the suggestion of finding options for cooperation. To send serious people dealing with similar subjects, not only a paper letter, but also a disk with various articles and ask for feedback. To ask the outsourcers if they have any plans for 64-bit projects and, if so, call the site. And so on and so forth.

It was compiled several lists and options for letters, in different directions. And we started sending out a large number of paper letters. Personalized paper spam.


Figure 1 - In the process ...

Result? The result is no better than sending emails. As it turned out, the probability that a paper letter gets to the address is very small and amounts to no more than 50%.


Figure 2 - Experimental distribution of letters with return receipt. Out of twenty delivered exactly ten

In more detail about this newsletter I wrote here . The situation described in the note refers to the distribution of letters for Russian companies, but the situation with foreign companies is no better. Perhaps the thing is more remote. As an example, I can show the missing letter to the DDJ journal. It seems to be a serious and thematic magazine, but try to reach him ...


Figure 3- “Letter, or There and Back” (letter not received in DDJ)

But those letters that came did not cause the expected reaction. Rather, they did not cause almost any. Probably, there is still a filter in the form of a secretary, a bad mood of the boss, and so on.

Conclusion - setting contact through paper letters is just as inefficient as in the case of emails. The price is comparable. It is easier to carry out their training, since they are not so highly personalized, but sending the letters themselves requires certain expenses: paper, toner, envelope, stamps, and good relations with the mail.

So, the search for direct contact is a dead end. You can still call, but this is also very time consuming, and subjectively we did not like this process. I will not say that we have seriously tried this direction, but according to our feelings, this is also an already experienced and non-working option. That is, I think people calling for the new year and offering Christmas decorations and decorations for the office may well find customers. A secretary overcoming holiday boredom can enthusiastically take up the issue of buying balls. But calls about “static code analysis” are clearly much more difficult. I think the synchrophasotron is also not offered by telephone. :)

We will think further. You can deliberately not give users even download a trial version of the product until the client provides a sufficient amount of information about themselves and contacts of people with whom you can communicate directly. So are some companies operating in this area. For example, Coverity. The price of the products is not known. From clients squeeze the maximum that can be squeezed out of them. Severe managers, seriously take on serious customers. On frivolous, they just do not pay attention. You can try it yourself and ask for a demo version by filling out a questionnaire. With a probability of 99% you will not even answer. Checked, and not just me. :)

We cannot afford such an approach. It is clear that you can hide the demo version. We are too small for this approach. Rather, the size here is secondary. We just do not have such experience, and, therefore, we should not take up what we do not know how to do.

Well, it’s impossible to communicate with those who can only potentially be interested in PVS-Studio. Perhaps they really are not interested. Then we decided to try to get feedback from those who still installed PVS-Studio. At the beginning, we asked users to fill in a short questionnaire when downloading, where they were supposed to provide an email address. Unfortunately, it turned out that many people fill in the questionnaire in the spirit of:

Name: 123
Company: 321
E-Mail: aaa @ bbb

There were correctly completed questionnaires, but people usually answered that they had not yet had time to try, or that they would look later. In general, the idea of ​​entering information was not justified, and we refused the questionnaire.

We also tried to find out the opinions of users, at the moment when they launch the removal of our tool. We opened a page with a small questionnaire to the user and asked him for a decree why the tool did not arouse interest. Unfortunately, almost everyone immediately closed the page without answering questions. It seems that no one even answered, or there were 1-2 people on the force. Thus, we don’t come back to the idea of ​​profiles when downloading / deleting a program.

We took a break, but recently we have a new idea, which we implemented in PVS-Studio 3.53. This is our new experiment and whether it will give us more communication is still unknown. Now, when studying PVS-Studio, a user can request a consultation from us, according to the diagnostic messages that he sees. And accordingly, when answering a question, an interesting discussion can start, and we can learn the interests of the potential user.

The mechanism works as follows. After the analysis, you can get up on the most interesting message, and select the menu item "What is it?". As a result, the text of the letter will be formed, which is proposed to send us an email and get a hint for this error. A small piece of code is inserted into the text in which a dangerous construction is found. Of course, information for the answer may not be enough, but the main thing is that the dialogue will start.


Figure 4- The generated text of the letter

The user can copy the text and send an email from his email program. We didn’t do automatic sending for privacy reasons. The program does nothing without full control by the user.

Those interested can download the demo version of PVS-Studio at http://www.viva64.com/ru/pvs-studio/download/ . I will also be glad to hear your opinion on this functionality and its improvement. It will be interesting and other thoughts on how to communicate more with potential customers.

While this idea seems to us the most successful. Frightens that a number of users may begin to send a lot of letters. But it will be seen later. If the experiment succeeds, then we will think about expanding this functionality and in case of interest in this post, I will tell you about the results in the future.