Product Launch

Reading Time: 3 minutes

E159: Why Emotional Reactions to Your B2B SaaS Are Actually A Good Thing

Summary
In this episode, Sean shares his experience with receiving emotional reactions about his B2B SaaS product and explains why it can be a positive sign. He emphasizes the importance of addressing users’ concerns and how lack of reaction is a much bigger problem. The presence of strong reactions means that the product is being used and providing value.

Key Points
• Emotional reactions to a product can be a good sign of engagement and value.
• Addressing user concerns is crucial to maintaining customer satisfaction.
• Lack of reaction to product issues may signify low usage and value.
• Availability and usability issues can be solved, but lack of reaction is a harder problem to address.
• Emotional reactions indicate potential product market fit and value for the user.

01:02 – 01:09
• “If you’re getting a reaction like that when your product has some type of issue […] that’s a really good thing.”

02:10 – 02:17
• “You can fix availability, you can fix usability. If your product is out there in the wild, your users and customers are interacting with it.”

02:31 – 02:43
• “You wanna look for areas of opportunity for a product to generate emotional or strong reactions, because that actually is a sign of positive feedback as in the value that your product is providing.”

02:43 – 02:59
• “When it becomes unavailable, the sooner you hear about feedback from your users about availability or usability, whatever the issue might be, the stronger potential your product market fit, and the more value they may be getting out of the product experience.”

Episode Transcript
Hey folks, Sean here, and in this episode, what I want to talk to you about is that if you are getting strong emotional reactions about your B2B SaaS product from your users and customers, even if those emotions are negative, why that can be actually be a very good thing. Now, the example that I’m gonna share with you is my podcasting B2B SaaS application called Podcast show notes. And what happened recently was that it was offline or unavailable for some users for a number of hours. As such, I got a flurry of messages through our support channel about them not being able to access and use our application. Some users, as you can imagine, were pretty upset now, while they rightfully should be, and this is always something that more like when it happens to you, not necessarily if, if you get to this point, is something that you should address as soon as you can.

What I want to share with you today is that that is actually a great sign. And here’s what I mean by that. If you’re getting a reaction like that when your product has some type of issue, whatever it is, usability, availability, it doesn’t matter. But if the reaction you get is strong, emotionally charged, potentially about your users and customers not having access for some reason, are not being able to get what they had been able to get from your product previously, that’s a really good thing. That’s a sign of the fact that they’re using your product, they’re getting value out of their product, and at this point they may need your product. So that is what it looks like when your users start to form habits around their process and your product. So all of these are largely good signs. Now, on the other hand, what I want you to consider is that what if that happened and you didn’t get any feedback, as in no one said anything.

That’s actually the worst situation. That’s considerably worse than if they’re reaching out, they’re complaining, and even if they’re emotional about it, or particularly upset, if you’re not getting any reaction whatsoever, that more than likely means that the product either isn’t being used or it’s not providing a ton of value. So those are much harder problems to solve. You can fix availability, you can fix usability. If your product is out there in the wild, your users and customers are interacting with it. But if you are not getting any reaction when the product isn’t available, that’s harder a problem to solve. And I’m always gonna prefer the formula over the ladder. So what I’m kind of getting at here is that you wanna look for areas of opportunity for a product to generate emotional or strong reactions, because that actually is a sign of positive feedback as in the value that your product is providing. When it becomes unavailable, the sooner you hear about feedback from your users about availability or usability, whatever the issue might be, the stronger potential your product market fit, and the more value they may be getting out of the product experience.