How do you get users to talk about you?

By respecting their time.

It’s a lot easier to watch a movie or Netflix and chill now than study for an exam or finish off some important work or work on that side hustle. Why?

We tend to choose immediate rewards or gratification than work/activities that can reward even highly later.

This is also why you would find yourself borrowing 1,000 shillings from a friend to be repaid after a few days only to spend it on unintended things when you could have denied yourself for these few days until pay day came, debt free.

How do we apply this to the products we are building?

1. By finding ways to give immediate positive outcomes to users and customers so that they can find immediate value and usefulness in our products.

Social media platforms do this with likes, upvotes and notifications.

Safaricom and M-pesa have knowingly or unknowingly done this by responding in a timely manner whenever a customer sends a complain via their social media platforms.

Building Africa does this by giving a gift to every founder interviewed immediately after the article goes live.

If you are building online, ensure that your app does well the one thing it says it does. When you open up Uber you expect to get that ride, when you open up Tiktok you don’t expect an empty feed even on sign up, when you order food on your app of choice you expect that food delivered as they said they would.

2. By being consistent with our actions

Note, not by being consistent with branding or marketing, but by being consistent with actions.

When you are starting out, you obviously don’t have the budget to hire a whole department of customer service personnel so the only thing that will make customers stick is your ability to deliver fast, efficiently and stay true to your word.

When we were building out the first version of Fom, the artists recommended us to other artists because when they had questions we were there to answer them, and when they had suggestions we did not take too long to implement.

Answer the questions that your first customers/users have quickly, without any bias, they will tell you what works and what doesn’t work. Implement the suggestions that they give fast (of course you will need a filter for this so you don’t just implement anything), for a while you will be the main customer care representative and this will require you to listen to complaints and act on them accordingly, if you want to be sticky, act fast.

Become sticky by providing an immediate positive outcome to your users/customers, mainly by respecting their time. People want positive outcomes and they want them now, not later.