MARTIN OMANDER: Today, I'm joined
by Waleed Abdulla, founder of Ninua.
Good to see you here, Waleed.
WALEED ABDULLA: Thank you, Martin.
MARTIN OMANDER: So you were here for the last episode.
For viewers who didn't watch the last episode,
would you give a brief description
of what Ninua, your startup, does?
WALEED ABDULLA: Sure.
So we have two products-- Symphony at symphonytools.com,
which is a social media dashboard for businesses
to publish to a lot of social networks at the same time
and to listen to what their customers are saying about them
on the social networks.
And the second is NetworkedBlogs,
which is a platform for bloggers to promote their blog
and network with other bloggers.
We have about 1.2 million bloggers on it.
MARTIN OMANDER: Great.
So on the last episode, we talked
about how you changed business models,
and this changing of business model
meant that you needed to go after a different customer
segment and have a slightly different product.
WALEED ABDULLA: Mhm.
MARTIN OMANDER: Now, this is a situation a lot of startups
face all the time-- that we need new features to go
after a new customer segment.
How did you validate that you were building
the right features that these customers needed and liked?
WALEED ABDULLA: So basically, we had
a few insights from our existing product,
things that we noticed as we interacted with our users.
And then we took that, and then we
want to decided what to do next.
We kind of knew we had to do something different.
And we had an idea what that might be,
but there was a lot of details and a lot
of possible directions to take.
So we took about a month to create
about 25 different business plans.
For each one, we would say, what if we do this,
and we go after this market?
How will that play out?
What are the options for finding customers, monetizing
the product?
What are the options for getting funding, and so on.
We created 25 of those, and then we selected the best.
So that was the first step.
And then after that, we started building a product.
And once we had a version that was,
let's say, an alpha version, barely works,
we started showing it to people, and we
started collecting feedback that way.
We showed it to lot of people-- from friends to random people
to other potential customers.
We collected a lot of feedback and kind
of modified the vision accordingly.
MARTIN OMANDER: And you had a pretty structured approach
of how you did this user testing.
Could you tell us a bit more about that?
WALEED ABDULLA: Right, so once we started showing it
to people, the first step was, show it to your friends.
So we have a lot of friends, and we just kind of bug them
and say, hey, can you take a look at this product
and tell us what you think?
So that was the first phase.
And we collected a lot of data and we modified it.
Once we felt comfortable with the overall feature set,
we went to the next step, which was to show it to real users.
So we had recruited users to take a look at it.
And we'll do a screen-sharing session with them
for about an hour.
We send them the link.
They take a look at the product, and they start using it.
And we'll just sit there and watch
what they do and take notes.
MARTIN OMANDER: So you're watching what they do.
Did you have them come into your office,
or did you do it remotely?
How did these sessions work?
WALEED ABDULLA: When we started with friends,
we'll just sit next to them.
But when we started doing it with other users,
we will do a Skype screen-sharing session.
So they will share their screen, and then we
send them the link right before the call
so they don't look at it before the call.
And we send it to them, and we just
ask them to behave as if we're not there,
and explore the product and speak their mind.
So they would say, I'm confused now.
I don't know what to do.
Should I click here?
Should I click there?
And we just listen, and we don't give them any hints.
We just kind of take notes that the user was confused
at this point, the user was excited at this point,
and so on.
MARTIN OMANDER: I see.
And so now, you're getting all these great feedback.
How do you integrate that with your project development?
WALEED ABDULLA: Yeah, so we did this for 60 days.
We would have one call every day.
And we'll take notes, and then we'll
modify the application that same day.
MARTIN OMANDER: That same day?
WALEED ABDULLA: That same day.
MARTIN OMANDER: Oh, wow.
WALEED ABDULLA: And then we'll have a different user next day
to take a look.
And then we know whether our changes
worked, or is the user still confused about this feature,
and so on.
So we kept doing that for two full months
until we felt very comfortable and we
started getting really good feedback from users.
MARTIN OMANDER: So you had lots and lots
of little very, very tight feedback cycles it sounds like.
WALEED ABDULLA: Yes, so at that point,
we were trying to validate that the product is well-designed,
it's easy to understand, and that people
cared about the features.
So we would have sometimes just fake menus,
and we'll see if someone would even click on them.
And that will tell us if someone's
interested in that thing.
And we will have different names for the actions,
different names for the menus, different colors.
And basically, we're testing how easy and intuitive the app is,
and whether people can just use it
without someone helping them.
MARTIN OMANDER: Oh, great.
You must have made a lot of changes over those two months.
WALEED ABDULLA: Yes, yes.
It saved us a lot of time in features
that we learned that they were not important.
We had a lot of features, like we
thought maybe analytics will be important.
MARTIN OMANDER: Oh, really?
Great.
One would think that, yeah?
WALEED ABDULLA: Yeah.
And we realized that, OK, very few of our users
actually cared.
So we decided, OK, let's not build that right away.
And then that helped us launch the product sooner.
MARTIN OMANDER: Oh, great.
What were some of the other things you liked,
on the other side-- things that people
liked that you hadn't expected?
WALEED ABDULLA: We had an option to share
your articles to social networks.
And we have two different ways of doing it.
So one of them, we called it crosspost
and the other one was share.
And there was a little bit of excitement
when people see the word "crosspost."
And they would say, oh, I know what that does.
And they immediately assumed it takes your post
and crossposts it all over the place.
And so we though, OK, that kind of was interesting.
And we started getting the same feedback every day.
So we start making that feature more and more prominent,
and we started improving it.
And then now, it's actually one of the most important features
in the product, which is something we discovered
through these tests that we wouldn't have known otherwise.
MARTIN OMANDER: Otherwise, it wouldn't have happened, right.
WALEED ABDULLA: Probably.
MARTIN OMANDER: And it sounds like it's a feature that you
might have built, but through user testing,
you discovered that was important,
and how to position it and name it.
WALEED ABDULLA: Exactly, exactly.
And that's very important, especially
when you're getting the user seeing your product
the first time, the first impression.
You want the application to be easy to understand,
and you want to make it intuitive so
that they don't get frustrated and having
to ask you a lot of questions about it.
MARTIN OMANDER: Great.
Well, thank you very much for sharing your experiences
with us, Waleed.
WALEED ABDULLA: Sure, you're welcome.
MARTIN OMANDER: Hope you found something
useful for your startup here.
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