| Hi progress-seeker,
Welcome to this week’s issue of INFUZED on PRODUCT.
In our ever faster-spinning society, we are getting hard-wired for impatience. The same applies to all of our customers, who seek that dopamine hit that comes with a successful event. While I’m a strong proponent of delayed gratification that only comes as a consequence of deliberate effort, we still need to consider the wide-spread search for instant gratification when constructing a product.
Here, adding another metric to your performance measurements can make big difference:
TIME TO VALUE - TTV
Time to value refers to the (perceived) time it takes a new customer to realize and extract the value you’ve been promising (or she’s been hoping for) from your product or service.
This is relatively quick for most physical goods, such as food and fashion, as the value is imminent the moment the customers holds it in their hands. You could play with some mechanisms that add additional value after that immediate gratification, i.e. by featuring your customer’s social media posts on your company page, which injects additional dopamine on top of just having that product.
For intangible products and services, such as coaching or consulting, it’s a tricky question to answer, but even more so worth tinkering with. Think about it. If your consulting project or coaching program is set up to thoroughly go for a transformation of which the benefits won’t really become apparent for another 4-6 months after starting, it requires a ton of effort to keep the customer engaged. If you can deliver some kind of value for the customer in your first call, it’s a different ballgame.
Digital products are the most difficult to optimize TTV, as they are generally extremely diverse in their value proposition and by that the time required to get to the desired outcome. While a game can deliver stress relieve and fun within seconds, a meditation program will not have a valuable effect within the first few sessions. The part that makes digital products so difficult is that however different the desired outcomes might be, they are still subconsciously compared in terms of immediacy to value, meaning you’re competing on the seconds and clicks to value level.
The goal is obvious by that point: reduce the time to value as much as you can. Be careful though with two aspects:
Do not compromise on the meaningfulness of the value you need to provide as quick as possible.
Do not release all value immediately, then you’ll give up any chance of retaining the customer.
Here is a more extensive guide and discussion of TTV, if this week’s INFUZED prompts you to dig deeper into this TTV thing. |
