I have been receiving lots of feedback about the site lately. This is a good thing as far as I am concerned, it means that people are checking the site out and are feeling compelled to speak up. And although I am overwhelmed by all the email lately, I am still thrilled to be getting it.

The feedback can easily be organized into 2 categories: (1) people who are seriously using the system to maintain their inventories, and (2) everyone else. The funny thing is, I expected that in this age of Web 2.0 and all, it would be really important for our site to look pretty and do fancy things. But the interesting thing is, the people in group (1) above don’t seem to care about the site being kinda “rough around the edges”. But the folks who do not use the system, seem to have a lot of interest in telling me how I should redesign the site, or change the colors, etc. (many of those people have been very nice to me, I don’t mean any disrespect!)

I can only get so much work done on the site at a time, and I still need to do lots of other small business related things. So what do I do? Do I put my effort and/or money into improving the way things look on the site? Or do I instead put my efforts and cash (if I can find any) into adding features that our customers are craving?

As a microISV, we realize that it’s important to analyze everything to determine what is and isn’t working. One of the things I was looking at recently was where my new users were coming from. There was a pattern that I almost missed. The folks who use the system seriously are telling their friends, and those people are using the system quite seriously as well. On the other hand, the people who critique the graphics and lack of fancy javascript either send me no customers at all, or just merely more newbies who are only using the system so they can tell me what they think of it. You can see why I’m so concerned about the first group of people.

My “power users” ask for new features that are not easy. Prior to our most recent release, the most requested feature was the ability to look up a coin’s value. So even though that was a doozy to implement, I went for it. And it has really paid off. How do I know? It’s all in the numbers baby!

Prior to implementing this new coin lookup feature, I had a very consistent number of customers who would use the system and then stick around and continue using it. I guess they must have liked the site and thought it didn’t suck too much.

But after implementing that new coin lookup feature, I saw an instant increase in the number of people who tried the system and then stuck around. And it has been pretty consistent. To me, the only explanation was that they too (just like my existing customers) wanted to know how much their coins were worth, and I provided them with a successfully working solution. And this wasn’t a 2 or 3 percent increase either. This was a 29% increase in this reported figure. I wonder, if the site was instead improved to look prettier, but didn’t provide this feature, would I have seen this same positive response? I doubt it!

So right now I’m still not working on the graphics, and instead I’m working on feature #2 … and it’s another doozy. This feature should be interesting because it gives my customers a cool feature they are asking for, but also will help me on the marketing front. So I’m excited to finish it and see the results it generates (hopefully positive ones!).