Pain vs Motivation:

Derek Skaletsky
8 min readJan 25, 2015

How are you going to get people to use your product?

How are we going to get people to use our product?

This is the question that drives the work of every early-stage product builder. Or better yet, drives him/her crazy. Everyone building a product is looking for the magic answer to this question.

Of course there is no magic answer, no silver bullet, but recently, at Knowtify, we’ve started to use a very simple little framework that has helped bring some clarity and direction to our product development (and beyond).

It looks like this:

I told you it was simple ☺

A little explanation:

First: The Pain of Using the Product

The X-axis of this little framework plots out the PAIN of getting started and getting initial value out of a product. There are many things that can contribute to the Pain of using a product:

  • Pain of signup/account creation—does the product allow a super simple signup (single click authorization via Twitter, FB, etc) or does it force people to talk to a salesperson and sit through a demo before getting an account?
  • Education—Is the product easy to understand or does it require extensive training? Either way, is it easy for users to access that training/learning? Does the product have a solid onboarding flow to help new users?
  • Required work—Is the user required to do a lot of work before even being able to use/get any value out of the platform (ie—a marketing automation system that requires the production of a lot of heavy content before it becomes valuable VS a service that requires, say, a simple 140-character post).
  • Email support—Does the product support a user’s activation via smart emails.
  • Additional users—Do users need to build a team or a network in the app before seeing value OR can he/she get some value as a lone subscriber?
  • Integration—Does the product require extensive integration (engineering work) before a user can see value or can they integrate with a simple click/authorization (by connecting to a Gmail or Twitter account, for example)?
  • General UX—Does the UX suck? Is it incredibly hard for a user to find & use the features he/she wants?

This is just a few of the things that can lead to a product being painful to use for a new user. Every product is different, but we found it very helpful to create a list of all the things that we think make our product “painful” to a new user (a hit list, if you will ☺).

Next: The Motivation to Use the Product

The Y-axis of this little framework covers a user’s MOTIVATION for using a product.

We’ve figured that Motivation is really a function of two things:

  1. The size of the problem the product is solving; and
  2. The attractiveness of the solution

People will be highly motivated to use your product if you are solving a big problem for them (man…I really need something to help me make sure the North Koreans don’t hack my company emails) and/or if your solution is super attractive (man…that is one sexy way to publish my selfies!).

If a product solves a big problem AND it provides a very attractive solution, it will drive super high levels of Motivation (I think a product like ZenPayroll fits this bill).

If a product DOESN’T solve a big problem, but provides a very attractive solution, then it will generate some Motivation (something like Shyp).

Likewise, if a product solves a big problem, but DOESN’T provide a very attractive solution, it may still generate some Motivation (many MVP products).

You get the picture.

At this point, you might be asking…

Fair question.

Pain vs Motivation

The point of all of this is:

In order to get users to start using and become active with a product, it will need to find a satisfactory balance between the Pain of using said product and a user’s Motivation for using said product.

Basically, you have to get above the green line in this framework:

In an ideal world, a product:

  • solves a significant pain,
  • with a unique, world-class solution,
  • in a simple & elegant way

Which would translate into:

High motivation, low pain. Money in the bank.

This would mean the product is driving huge motivation with a painless user experience. This is the Holy Grail. Very few get here, but it is certainly the goal.

Then again, a product may drive high motivation, but is really hard to use.

High motivation, but very painful to use

In this case, many people aren’t going to use the product. In this case, the builders of this product should focus on making the product easier to use (maybe through training…better onboarding…maybe professional service — ugh…maybe better UX…etc). I would argue that this is the profile of an old enterprise software product. It’s going to be hard to win with this profile in today’s software world.

Then again, a product may be super simple to use, but not generate much motivation (I think a lot of small mobile apps fit in this bucket today).

Very easy to use, but not much motivation to do so

In this case, the product builders need to either to solve a bigger problem (pivot?); bring a better solution; OR do a better job marketing the solution they have.

The Reality of Most Early Stage Products

The reality is that most early stage products fall somewhere around here:

They’ve targeted a semi-big problem to solve and have an early-stage product that is way more painful to use than it needs to be.

For the entrepreneur, this is often a very painful place to be. Seth Godin might call it The Dip—I call it The Slog. During this period, it often feels like you are running in a mud pit. You’re taking daily steps, but they ain’t coming easily. There are customers that want to use your product, but each one seems to have a different reason of why they can’t or won’t.

Does this integrate with my current X system? Well, no…not yet.

Can I get a report that shows my XYZ? Well, no…not yet.

Do you support XYZ data sets? Well, no…not yet.

So…how does this little framework help for early stage product builders?

It might not help you. It might just be a fun little picture to look at.

But for us, at Knowtify, it provides a very simple way to think about and prioritize our work. Like all startups, we have very limited resources, so being smart about what we work on is essential. This framework allows us to ask the right questions.

We know that whatever we decide to work on needs to help us move the little red dot in one of two directions:

And not just move it a little. We have to look hard for the things that will move this dot at a rate that is disproportionate to the work involved.

Decrease the Pain or Increase the Motivation?

As I mentioned, one thing this framework allows us to do is ask the right questions—which will hopefully lead to good answers.

When we look to answer the question — What will make our app less Painful to use?— we look to things like:

  • Can we make it easier for users to integrate/insert their data into Knowtify?
  • Can we improve the onboarding experience so that we can get users to see value faster?
  • Can we offer proactive support or certain services that eliminate some of the early pain?
  • Can we put more work into the UX of existing features to make them easier to use for new users?
  • What else can we do to lower the Pain?

On the flip side, when we look to answer the question—What would help increase a user’s motivation to use the product?—we look at things like:

  • Is the problem we’re solving big enough? We know we don’t have a lot of control over this one, but we can try to pivot to a bigger problem, or we could…
  • …do a better job at messaging the problem. Maybe we can market our way to a bigger problem?
  • Are there specific features that we could build that would deliver significant value and/or help differentiate us even more—making the solution more attractive?
  • Can we work on the onboarding so that we are better highlighting the future value a new user could derive from Knowtify—making it a more attractive solution early on in the lifecycle of a user?

What else can we do to drive more Motivation?

Just organizing these discussions around these two questions has really helped frame our work. From these questions have come a bunch of ideas/features/initiatives. We put them into the pipeline and we are able to assess each of them based on (a) which lever (Pain or Motivation) is most important for us to attack at that moment; and (b) how much will each idea/feature/implementation idea move that little red dot.

Yes…our lives are now ruled by that damned little red dot.

We have actually started alternating our resources between these two levers. We spend time working on something that will bring the Pain down for our users…and then we work on something that will increase their Motivation.

The hope is that if we ask the right questions, make the right decisions, and execute well on them, we will, over time, find ourselves moving that little red dot above that green line…and driving a boatload of new active users onto our platform!

We’ll get there. I have confidence.

Would love your thoughts on this…

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Derek Skaletsky
Derek Skaletsky

Written by Derek Skaletsky

Tech founder (mostly SaaS). Latest — Sherlock (sherlockscore.com); Boston expat; Hollywood escapee; hack photographer; dad (x2)

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