How to Create "Super Users" for Your App

#learning #community #beginners #startup

Super users are passionate, engaged users who are willing to go above and beyond to help you promote your app. They can be a valuable asset to your business, helping you attract new users, generate buzz, and provide feedback on your app.

Product Design Basics

If you're looking to create super users for your app, the basic things you need to cover are:

Teaser product. You should have a great basic product that solves a daily (or just frequent) task or problem for the largest user population.
Fully optimized funnel. You need to have a fully optimized user funnel to raise awareness of your product and make it easy for users to join. This includes simple onboarding and likely a free product feature to “try” your app.
Product bridges. Once people are using your app, you need to have bridgeways to other useful adjacent features or products within the app. It means you need to make it easier for users to stay with you than to download and try another app.
Customer support. You need to have great customer support when things inevitably don’t go as planned.
Beta testers. Invite users to beta test and provide feedback.
Data metrics. Track intra-product performance metrics to identify friction points across your product features and design for allowing users to transition seamlessly across product features. Super users will have high-frequency scores AND will use multiple products or features.

Identify Your “Super Users”

From the data perspective, super users will represent a smaller portion of your app’s users. Analyzing the common characteristics of super users and how they became super users can bring surprising insights into the next strategic decisions for your app.

Here are a few tips to help you identify the sub-portfolio of super users and some examples of such insights:

Frequency of use. The strength of users can be identified through the frequency of using your app. This should be measured across the entire user base, as well as through breaking your user base into sub-portfolios of users. If your users only use the app once a month (or similarly infrequently) it's very difficult to create recurring, sticky user behavior.
Number of products / features used. The strength of super users can be identified through the number of products or features the entire user base uses. Additionally, creating sub-portfolios of users based on the specific features used and the number of features helps you to identify your super users. Does a high percentage of your users only use one product or feature on your app? If so, switching costs for the majority of your users will be low and a competitor may enter your market with a similar product.
User cohorts. The strength of super users can be identified through conducting data analysis on user cohorts to track their progression in onboarding, using the initial product, increasing frequency of use, and ultimately using other products or features. When analyzing super users through cohort analysis, it's important to not fit the data to meet expectations, as there may be surprising insights. For example, you may find out what the best teaser products or features are, and where the friction points in onboarding or bridging users to other products are.

Common Challenges in Creating Super Users

There are some common scenarios in which product managers find themselves where they are trying to create a loyal base of followers but miss the mark because they don’t fully understand their product.

Teaser versus core products. Understanding the best product feature that brings users to your app isn't always straightforward as there are situations where the product feature with the highest user value proposition is actually the product with the highest onboarding friction or not the largest user market. The outcome from this situation is typically a scenario where your app becomes somewhat niche for a specific type of user base: you have users who are willing to seek out your app and go through the onboarding friction but it is harder for you to create mass appeal.

In this situation, the solution would be running an in-depth data analytics exercise to compare user conversion rates and market sizing to the first product feature a user uses after onboarding, which will provide information about possible mismatch. If there is an issue, then the real hard part comes in redesigning your product to allow for streamlined onboarding into your teaser product.

“Super user” funnel. No user starts as a super user, therefore, the funnel of creating super users doesn't stop when a user onboards onto your app. Designing product bridges across your app is required to create a funnel of super users, and tracking the conversion across different features provides the feedback loop of where to make changes to increase the pool of super users.

Here the solution lies in running an in-depth data analytics exercise to understand how many product features the average user uses on a monthly basis, then understanding how users discover additional features once onboarded and using their first product feature. From these analytics, designing nudges and incentives to increase the number of product features the average user uses will increase the stickiness of your product.

All in all,

having super users in your app can bring a multitude of benefits both for you and your users. They can serve as advocates for the app, providing valuable feedback and insights that can lead to improvements, and, ultimately, cultivating and nurturing a community of super users can be a powerful tool for any app looking to succeed in today’s competitive market.