Case Study: Vizy CEO Amos Gewirtz Figured Out How To Increase User Engagement Of Their Product

Learn from Amos how he and his team at Vizy increased user activity of their product.

Aug 25, 2020

The Problem - Getting Users To Deeply Engage With Your Product or Service
It’s easy to build something, but it’s hard to create something someone wants to use all the time. More startups fail not because they can’t build, but because they built something that users don’t need.

Action Item: To build what people need and want, you have to first understand why they would use your product or service in the first place.
The Solution - Focus On Resolving Customer Problems Rather Than Implementing Their Proposed Solutions

The feedback you get from your users will consist of them telling you about their problems and proposed solutions. You need to focus on the former, not the latter, to satisfy the majority of your userbase.

Action Item: Pay close attention to the problems your users face - if one is dealing with them, it’s a good indicator many of them are.
The Takeaway - Ask The Right Questions That Help You Identify Customer Issues

At the core of building a great product or service isn’t your ability to build, but your ability to ask the right questions to know what to build.
Action Item: Take time to craft the questions you want to ask your users.

Founder File: Lessons Learned From A Hard Pivot

After graduating with a degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago, Amos went to work on the investment team at Bridgewater Associates in Connecticut. After leaving Bridgewater, Amos founded Vizy and moved from Brooklyn to San Francisco for Y Combinator's Summer 2019 batch.

Vizy cofounders Sam Nickolay (left) and Amos Gewirtz (right).

The Problem: Getting Users To Deeply Engage With Your Product or Service

What was the toughest problem you've solved recently?

The toughest problem we've recently solved was how to get people to engage with our product deeply.

Describe the nature of the problem. What are the critical constraints?

We define "deep engagement" as an average user having 3 hours of calls per day (or about 40 individual calls) on Vizy. When we hit that target, we'll begin moving out of beta and transitioning customers to paid plans (though we're currently at about 30 minutes a day of calls, so we still have a long way to go). Achieving deep engagement is hard because our users are frugal with their time and will only spend it on tools they find very useful.

What was your initial thought process in solving the problem?

Our initial solution was to build virtually any feature users requested. That was premised on the assumption that making exactly what people asked for would result in those people using the product. At the time, this seemed to us like common sense, even though it wasn't true.

The Solution: Focus On Resolving Customer Problems Rather Than Implementing Their Proposed Solutions

How did you evaluate your initial solutions before trying to implement them?

We implemented the solution before rigorously evaluating it and realized pretty quickly that most of the time, building user-requested features willy-nilly (especially elaborate, non-obvious ones) didn't necessarily result in more engagement.

When you were working to implement them, what else did you discover that either confirmed you were on the right track or opened your eyes to a new facet of the problem?

Throughout speaking with users, we began listening more closely to the problems our users shared than the features they proposed. That allowed us to be more confident in filtering out features that only suited one or two customers in favor of ones that addressed more fundamental problems. Interestingly, we found that issues voiced by a single customer turned out to be shared for many customers, whereas solutions proposed by customers were generally quite specific.

When did you realize that you arrived at the right solution to this problem?

We knew we had arrived at the right solution when we began pushing features and seeing rising engagement soon after. There was this one moment when we implemented a feature to allow people to pull in additional teammates to a call quickly and, within a matter of days, saw users across the board spending more time on calls. Seeing that kind of direct cause-effect relationship told us we were on the right track.

The Takeaway: Ask The Right Questions That Help You Identify Customer Issues

Did that solution come with its caveats or tradeoffs? If so, what are they?

There aren't any major tradeoffs but one small caveat is that the way we're building now requires more critical thinking and creativity than what we were doing before.

What is your general advice for founders on how to face the challenges related to getting to engage with their product deeply?

Be experimental when trying to solve the problem of engagement. We use a pretty simple method:

Brainstorm a list of hypotheses (e.g., if we do [solution], then engagement will increase).
Assign each hypothesis a 1-5 score of how likely you think the hypothesis is to be true (5 being very likely) and another 1-5 score on how easy the hypothesis is to test (5 being very easy)
Add those two scores together and rank hypotheses from highest to lowest.
Start at the top of the list and test each hypothesis (whether that means building a new feature, changing how new users are onboarded, or qualifying leads differently) one at a time so as to reduce confounding factors.
Measure subsequent changes in engagement via your preferred metric. Be sure to use a mix of qualitative and quantitative metrics.

How did you and your cofounder adjust to listening more closely to problems voiced by customers versus their proposed solutions?

It's all about asking the right questions. Instead of saying, "what kind of features do you wish your preferred collaboration app had?" ask, "what do you hate about the way you collaborate?" Or "what's something you wish people on your team did differently?" Or "What frustrate you about collaboration at the moment?" Questions with strong emotional language tend to elicit genuinely essential problems. Keep in mind that real emotional engagement usually requires that you have a rapport with the person you're speaking with rather than just being a random user.

What additional things must you think about before moving to implement a solution or new feature for your users?

We use the ranking system I mentioned above as a framework to think through potential solutions. Still, there are undoubtedly other relevant questions we ask ourselves that relate to retention at an aggregate level, such as:

Are there any users that might engage less because of this feature?
Does this feature take away from other features that people use?

After solving this previous problem, what's the toughest issue you're facing right now?

One thing we're struggling with is increasing the frequency of releases. We're a team of just three engineers, so we have to be laser-focused on what we do day-to-day to hit release deadlines. We aggressively triage todos based on what we think will have the most significant positive impact on retention, engagement, or acquisition relative to implementation cost.

Name three other people I should profile next for F2F Case Studies.

Thomas Dowling, founder of TaxProper: TaxProper values real estate and files an appeal when a property is overvalued.
Ryan Letzeiser, founder at Obie: Obie builds insurance and portfolio management software for real estate investors.
Kirti Shenoy, founder at Puzzl: Puzzl builds an API that automates payroll.

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