The Startup Chat with Steli and Hiten

163: How to Announce Product Updates


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In this episode, Steli and Hiten share tips and tactics that keep your customers up-to-date with your products or services. Listen and learn from Steli and Hiten’s own personal experience of what works, what doesn’t work, and the feasible, clear-cut methods you can easily employ to keep your clients in the loop.  

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:36 – “One of the most painful things that can happen is a client unsubscribing because your product is lacking some feature…”

01:04 – Failing in educating your customers
02:03 – It’s tough as a customer to be educated in a product’s new features
02:32 – Hiten shares his pet peeve – bugging customers in the wrong ways
03:14 – Unnecessary pop ups and product update notices can frustrate customers
04:38 – Steli shares about his own experience
05:43 – Do something much more simple – Drift as an example
06:26 – In 2006, Crazy Egg had a top bar that had an update sharing what they changed with the product
07:49 – “If you’re not logging into your product and seeing these messages, then you’re probably not doing your job”
08:51 – The methods that used to work may not work anymore
09:10 – Share your updates on Facebook and Twitter
09:21 – Find a way to write great posts regarding your updates
10:44 – Break up your upgrades up into “checkers” and “chess” categories
12:00 – Bundle small changes together and frame it saying “these are all the bugs we’ve fixed”
12:30 – Try using mobile app update posts
13:07 – Big changes are defined by feature launches, think about creative ways to launch
13:40 – Product Hunt is a great way to use for releases
13:55 – Do weekly updates
15:21 – Send less generic newsletters
16:25 – Spend time on the copy and framing of your updates
17:21 – Tell customers about new support articles you created
18:49 – Have a public road map that tells customers what you’re going to do
19:35 – Have a public change log
20:21 – Reduce churn by keeping your customers up-to-date
21:31 – Find people who aren’t using a feature and send them a specialized email
24:22 – Get the engineers and product people telling us what they’ve built and how they feel about it
24:50 – Do the next, logical, feasible thing you CAN do, not the coolest

3 Key Points:

Make the effort to EDUCATE your customers with changes you’ve made to your product.

Cut the unnecessary stuff—pop ups, product update notices, etc.
Break updates into small changes and big changes and FOCUS on how you FRAME the information to your customers.

Resources Mentioned:

Drift and Crazy Egg – Ways you can update

Product Hunt – Where you can launch new releases

The post 163: How to Announce Product Updates appeared first on The Startup Chat with Steli & Hiten.

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The Startup Chat with Steli and HitenBy Steli Efti & Hiten Shah: Serial Entrepreneurs, Sales & Marketing Experts, Startup Investors & Advisors, CEOs running multi million dollar SaaS Startups

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