Sidra Arif

During the year of our business I answered all the support emails myself. It was hard. I did not like it. Looking back it was the important thing we did and I almost handed it over too soon.

Analytics showed which buttons were pressed. The inbox showed which actions users wanted. These are two types of information. One day a user wrote: "I expected the export button to send the report to my accountant." Our button saved a file. No one would have ever noticed this difference in the funnel chart;. In the next month three other users had the same issue. We added an email button. The problem went away.

Now I keep a spreadsheet with four columns. The words that the person uses the screen they were on what they were hoping for and what actually happened. Patterns start to appear after forty entries. It is important to write down the words since they will become your landing page copy and button labels.

There is a risk. Support emails are more likely to come from customers and less likely from happy quiet ones. That feature no one ever asks about could be the thing that keeps everyone coming which is why I look at the email box along with the retention numbers not instead of them.

Two years ago my hardware store struggled to attract search traffic for tools. We had hundreds of product pages. Most of them simply copied the manufacturer s short two sentence description.

Google treated those pages as content and placed larger competitors ahead of us. I stopped worrying about backlinks. Spent three months rewriting the top fifty product pages in my own words.

I added details about the materials the tool could cut its weight and common mistakes people make when using it. I answered the questions that our in store customers asked me every day.

Within sixty days organic traffic to those pages rose by more than forty percent. The pages began ranking for long tail search queries that I never even targeted on purpose.

For the year of our app we offered a free basic plan to attract as many users as possible. I expected this large group of users to eventually upgrade when they reach our usage limits.

The reality was entirely different from my expectations. Free users produced ninety percent of our support tickets. Asked for complex features they would never pay for. Meanwhile our actual paying customers got slower response times because we were busy managing the tier.

Three weeks ago we made a decision and disabled the free plan, for new signups. We replaced it with a fourteen-day trial that requires a credit card upfront. I honestly expected our daily registrations to drop to zero and our growth to stop completely.

Registrations dropped by eighty percent. Our actual paid conversions increased by forty percent in the first month. The people signing up now are buyers who test the product thoroughly instead of creating throwaway accounts.