How Our Customers Designed Our Website for Us

If you’d like, you can click here to listen to this article on Eariously.

My partner Brendan and I are voracious readers. Last summer, we shared so many articles with each other that we didn’t have time to read it all. The articles that Brendan shared with me would sit in a bookmarks folder, collecting digital dust. I’d read them one at a time, but the pile always seemed to be growing. We thought, “We both drive a lot. What if we could just listen to all these things in the car?” When we poked around, we didn’t love any of the options we tried.

We weren’t so sure that enough other people had the same problem as we did. So many articles to read, and not enough time to do it all. So, in an afternoon, I used Canva and Squarespace to make a landing page. We weren’t sure what an app might even look like, but I made a best guess at what a player might look like. Visitors could add their email address to our waiting list. The page contained the the app mockup, some copy, and a form.

Landing pages are quick and cheap experiments to learn from. Before we begin designing and developing anything, we always start with a landing page. They help us to understand why folks are signing up and usually they’re open-minded to a brief conversation. We’ve probably given up too quickly on particular problems we’re interested in solving, but because Brendan and I live off of the software that we design and develop, waiting list sign ups help us to understand the potential value of continuing or not. Our subsequent conversations validate whether it’s worth continuing or not.

When we make a product landing page, our moms and sisters always sign up. (Thank you. We love you.) Sometimes, the list flatly ends there. When we made the Eariously landing page, we unexpectedly saw quite a number of signups. The size of the list gave us the urge to build a prototype. As it continued to grow, the quality of the feedback we garnered from conversations gave us the confidence to keep going.

About a year elapsed between the time we created a landing page and when we started selling subscriptions. Along the way, we tried our best to keep folks on our waiting list informed with what we were up to (while sprinkling in the occasional question so that we could design the ideal listening experience for them). Every new nugget of information helped us to make something just a little bit better by better understanding the needs of our future listeners.

We Think of Our Website as a Product

We think of our website as a standalone product, requiring constant experimentation and improvement. Last month, when we began selling subscriptions last month, the first change we made was to simply change the “Add Your Name to Our Wait List” button to “Start Listening for Free”, which would lead visitors to download the app and start their listening trial.

Despite pressing “on”, we knew that visitors wouldn’t be flocking to our landing page. We knew, too, that when new visitors landed, there was hardly enough information to elicit any sort of emotional reaction (and a subsequent buying decision).

But, what was next? A number of very obvious things were evident from the onset. The initial Canva-created app mockup didn’t look anything like the app we made. Ruth, our brilliant visual designer, had created beautiful branding, but it was nowhere to be seen. The page failed to explain how Eariouly worked or why anyone might want to buy it. The initial changes were easy enough. We showed off what the app actually looks like, and added Ruth’s lovely branding.

Our Customers Are Our Best Copywriters

The number of customers we have is small, but we’re very lucky to know that they love what we’re making. More importantly, they’ve been indispensable to our ability to figure things out and improve what we’re offering.

The original landing page lived for about a year. When folks would ask what Eariously is, we’d tell them the same copy as they’d see on the site, “Eariously lets you listen to the things you want to read, like news and articles.” We thought that the copy was clever. But, it was frequently confusing. We tried variation after variation, but we weren’t ever satisfied with what we came up with.

After two weeks of listening, we noticed that a handful of our listeners were particularly active. These were folks who were frequently adding new listens to their queues, adding Eariously to their daily commutes, and sharing listens with their friends. So, we asked them, “How do you describe Eariously to other people?”

We wrote down what they said and compared the responses. They were all nearly identical. The funny thing? Our listener’s copy was significantly easier to understand than ours. According to them, “Eariously turns digital pages into audio, so that you can listen to the news, blogs, and articles you like to read.”

Better!

It turns out that our happiest listeners are also our best copywriters. One of our listeners made an especially insightful (and delightful) comment. Katie explained, “Your original copy says ‘want to read’, whereas this copy now says ‘like to read’. We don’t use Eariously to replace our reading. We use Eariously to augment our reading. We want to read nonstop, and your product allows us to.” We hadn’t and couldn’t say it better.

After we began designing visuals for the website, their feedback guided us to focus on what they like most: ease of use. Brendan and I love puns , and one particular listener loves the phrase “Eariously easy”. He was insistent upon the copy making its way to the public-facing site. Dylan, it’s on the site now.

By focusing on the ease-of-use as our main offering, our site was beginning to take some direction. We were beginning to show, not tell. This epiphany led us to ask ourselves, what were we continuing to tell instead of show?

After months and months of testing with hundreds of listeners, we knew our most common questions? The single most common question? “What do the app’s voices sound like?”

If someone was going to listen to a voice everyday, it better be something they could get used to. We agree. At the time, our site included some customer reviews about the voices. In effect, “the voices sound really good.” Sometimes things are just so obvious that they’re easy to miss. Folks dropping by wanted to hear what they’d hear if they signed up. We added voice samples. (Alfred, who we imagine to be a posh British librarian, is our favorite.)

We also added links to a few other things we’ve written lately so that visitors could get a better understanding of what articles sound like in context:

What Is Next? We’ll Listen to Our Listeners

Slowly and surely, we’ve been letting folks on our waiting list know that they can start listening and can give Eariously a try for free. A handful of folks have replied to let us know that they’d really like to follow along with our progress, but they’re not quite ready to add Eariously to their lives.

The two of us both use a very short list of apps on a daily basis, so we wholeheartedly understand. So that they can follow along, we made a blog to share our team’s progress. Anytime we make anything, we never seem to write anything down. (We’re trying our best to fix it this time.)

We’re not entirely sure what will be next to make our website better, but we’re sure that our listeners will let us know. And we’ll be delighted to listen.

Originally published at https://www.eariously.com.