Is our product heading in the right direction?

The best method of validating a product is to acquire paying customers.

But what if you already have paying customers, and you want to be REALLY sure that your product is heading in the right direction?

Check if you have paying customers, who overcome the EXTRA obstacles to buy your product.

We have such infamous examples in Bootstrap Shuffle:

1. A Chinese user, who tried to buy a subscription through VPN (ultimately blocked by PayPal).
2. Users who moved from a ($6/month) subscription to a ($60) license.

Why is the second example so crucial? Because to do that today, you have to:

(Remember that we started 2 months ago!)

1. Check that you can’t do that in the interface.
2. Write to the support@ with a question, what to do in this situation.
3. In response, you will receive a message that moving from a subscription to a license is not yet available in the interface. BUT if you really care, you can:
   1. cancel a PayPal subscription
   2. create a new account with a made-up e-mail,
   3. pay for a full license ($60!),
   4. write about it to us, and we will connect your old and new account.

During last week, two users went through this procedure!

To be honest, until they applied for support I didn’t assume that such a situation will take place (so soon).

As a Product Owner your main goal should be to remove these obstacles! And that’s exactly what we do 🙂 If you’re our customer, can you share with me ( [email protected] ) what’s the one thing that nearly stopped you from buying from us?