Scaleup survival: How to drive remarkable product adoption at scale
A lot has happened since our last update! The last time I wrote about Eduscale, it was still unclear where we were going. All we knew was that we would solve this huge problem, of software users misinterpreting the product. What once started out as a customer education agency, ended up as a software product.
Are you excited to see what we’ve been building in the last months? Keep on reading!
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New here? Get a quick recap!
As it turns out, a lot of users misunderstand software and end up not using it or abandoning it altogether. If they don’t see the value immediately, they get frustrated and they churn. Needless to say in today’s world this also reflects in reviews and thus influences new decision-makers as well.
Determined to tackle this problem by its roots and help his clients, Jente founded Eduscale. A customer education agency that created educational content for end-users.
Quickly, it became clear Eduscale was solving a big problem for SaaS companies. But there’s only so much you can do as an agency. After experimenting with ways to scale this approach and trying out tens of tools, we couldn’t find anything that could truly help us. The approach had to be changed...
🎓 One plus one equals Eduscale
The biggest, and perhaps most exciting change since last time is the entrance of our new co-founder Yarne Coppens.
Yarne, just like Jente, started out as a student entrepreneur! With his background in business studies, he learned coding independently and started a web agency geared towards startups and SME’s. After a few years, he graduated into building full-fledged apps. There’s nothing he can’t learn!
The two co-founders met each other in their previous lives as agency owners. (Sounds weird to say if you’re fresh out of school). They joined forces and Yarne started working with Jente to create stunning websites and platforms for their clients.
Now, the two are working on our newest product to improve our approach to customer education: our very own customer education engine! Instead of solely relying on services, we can now make a bigger impact with our own customer education tool.
🏗️ Building our own customer education tool
To ensure that end-users don’t misunderstand or abandon your product from the get-go, you need to support them throughout their journey. However, you can’t possibly give 1-on-1 support to every user. You need a solution that can deliver personalized customer education at scale.
It’s our goal is to help technology companies eliminate churn, boost product adoption & scale customer success by strategically using customer education throughout the customer journey. We achieve that by providing the right content, in the right place, and at the right time.
How? It starts by analyzing the user behavior, so we can make recommendations at the time when your user needs it the most. When are your users most active and when do they need the extra nudge in the right direction?
The right place is obviously within the app. Nobody wants to go to their email or surf through a giant knowledge base to read instructional content about your software. You can A/B test different recommendations to see which recommendations work, and which don’t.
It’s a lot easier to determine when and where you can provide value for each user, and you don’t have to be a data wizard. Our education engine will automatically identify AHA moments and make it easier for you to impact the end-user's journey.
🆕 The power features inside our education engine
Hassle-free behavior tracker
Even though we’re just up and running, our engine has some cool features to help you add value for users! You start out by adding a single line of code to your app. Once that’s done, you won’t have to touch any code ever again.
Our customer education engine will start collecting data about your users. What pages are they visiting? Where are they clicking? How much time are they spending on different features?
With all this information we’re able to determine which behaviors are most likely to lead users to AHA moments. Similarly, we can detect anomalies to prevent users from churning. You’ll get to learn more about what your users want and when they’re ready for your next development.
The next step is turning those insights into actions. We allow you to quickly improve the user experience, without having to bother your engineering team. Below are some things you can do with our education engine.
Create power users with in-app recommendations
What if you could give every user a personalized journey based on their goals and behavior within your app? That’s exactly what you can do with the education engine! You can recommend content based on the users' context and help them get more value from your product.
For example, if we see a user spending a lot of time tracking his expenses manually while there’s a feature for that, we can recommend that feature within the app. Or maybe they are not using a feature efficiently? In that case, you could give them a product tour or an instruction video from your resource academy!
Scale customer success with step-by-step walkthroughs & product tours
Obviously, users need to experience your product's value as soon as possible. That’s why the golden rule of onboarding is to activate your users from the start. You don’t want to confuse them, but rather show them the value in a clear and simple way.
What better way to guide users than building it inside your app? With the education engine, you can give product tours to show users around or create step-by-step walkthroughs to take them through more difficult parts of your product.
Boost product adoption with contextual tooltips
Activating your user once isn’t enough. You want to keep them engaged by continuously providing value. It’s not until your product starts becoming a habit that you can speak of adoption. All you need to do is keep leading users to the next step, and helping them grow into product experts themselves.
You can use tooltips to help users reach their goals. Let’s say you’ve developed a new feature, you can introduce it to users that might find it helpful.
On the other hand, you can add value by teaching your users how to do a better job. For instance, if you’re an e-mail marketing tool you might be able to give a few tips on how to write better subject lines. Use your knowledge and expertise to help your users succeed!
Make it feel like your own product
The last thing you want to do is confuse your users even more. That’s why there are no limits to customizing your education layer. You can create the look, feel, and tone of voice that belongs to your product.
Inside the pop-ups or overlays, you can embed rich media and basically build a micro-site within your app. The sky is the limit, and soon you’ll be able to do even more powerful things!
Additionally, both users and admins can select preferences for pop-ups. You can select a maximum ceiling so you’re not becoming spammy, or users can just disable their own pop-ups.
How to get started with customer education?
You can get started for free today. All we need to do is add a single snippet to your software and we can start analyzing the user behaviors. Once we’ve identified the AHA moments we can start experimenting.
The first three months we invest in our customers by not charging until they get value from our platform. We call this the incubation period, in which we'll help you set up the platform & run experiments to validate your first 3 AHA moments.
📈 Unfinished business - what’s next?
We have come a long way in a few months. The shift from a service-focused agency to a more product-focused approach felt like a logical choice. We’re happy with the progress we’ve made, but there’s still a lot of work to do.
Currently, we’re testing our product and going all-in on the feedback we’re getting. A lot of plans are on the table but right now we need to keep our vision clear. If you would like to have a sneak peek and what’s yet to come, you can check out our live high-level roadmap here!