A month of coding down the drain.
“What are the top features you’d look for in a Pinterest analytics product?” we asked the client, prepared to hear an agenda for our demo.
We expected to pull back the curtain on a solution for exactly those problems, and awe them with our intuition and customer insight.
A minute later we realized we’d failed.
Our client’s answer to our question was not what we’d anticipated. We didn’t support any of the use cases they enumerated. Every single feature they mentioned focused on tracking activity across all Pinterest users for their ecommerce site. Our entire product focused on engagement around their Pinterest account. We’d completely missed the mark.
Rewind a month.
We’d just finished meeting with a number of friends at social media agencies, where many had expressed a need for analytics for Pinterest. Pinterest was new; it didn’t yet support any tracking or work with any of the big analytics packages. Also, the existing products were overly complicated for the social platforms they did support. They wanted something simple, something they could use to show their clients they were doing a good job.
Perfect. We could easily solve this for them. We started work on an MVP, confident that the Pinterest API could easily cover this use case.
Except it wasn’t easy.
As we moved higher within the organizations, engaging with financial buyers, things became more complicated. At the time, social media was seen as a bit of a black art. A lot of social folks operated on instinct rather than data. Buyers didn’t want to pay for something that risked showing their efforts in anything but the best possible light.
No problem. We’d switch customers, focusing on their clients instead. These clients, big ecommerce brands with a strong social presence, definitely wanted to know social engagement on their accounts, right?
We emailed a few friends in social media at some big brands and asked them if analytics for Pinterest were important to them. They said yes. Slam dunk. We spent the rest of the month frantically finishing the MVP to demo.
Which brings us back to the client demo. What did we do wrong?
We switched customer segments without properly re-examining the value proposition. While both customer segments wanted Pinterest analytics, their understanding of “Pinterest analytics” varied greatly. To the agency folks, “Pinterest analytics” meant social engagement data from campaigns run on Pinterests site; new boards, successful repins, etc. Conversely, to brands “Pinterest analytics” meant data from engagement with the brand across all of Pinterest. Essentially, they wanted to know how many times images from their website were pinned. The minor difference of definition resulted in a drastically different feature set.
We’d built a product for our first customer segment but were trying to sell it to our second. And we didn’t even realize a difference until our first sales pitch.
We’ve learned our lesson the hard way; we now always vet our assumptions by asking customers to explain the value proposition back to us, in detail. Remember, while everyone may claim to go to the gym to get “in shape”, depending on who you ask, “in shape” may mean “ready for bikini season” or it may mean “strong enough to lift a car”.
The old annoying cliché about assumptions is half right. I certainly felt like a bit of an ass leaving that meeting.
LIFFFT 