Daniel, founder of Turan, discusses three common pitfalls SaaS products face, including hidden features and a lack of dedicated product ownership. Learn how these issues impact user retention and product success.
Chapters
00:00
Introduction
Introduction to Turan and the speaker's background in SaaS product development.
00:13
Hidden Features
Discussing the issue of valuable features that users never discover or use.
01:04
Lack of Ownership
Exploring why teams often lack dedicated roles for managing user experience.
02:11
Stalled Metrics
The impact of poor feature discovery and lack of ownership on growth.
Transcript
00:00
Hi, Daniel here, founder of Turan.
00:02
Nice to meet you.
00:03
I want to give you a quick intro before you check out the rest of the page.
00:06
page.
00:07
After 15 years and over 120 SaaS products, here's what I can tell you.
00:12
Almost every product I look at has the same three problems.
00:16
And I'm guessing yours has at least one of them too.
00:19
The first one, features that nobody finds your team builds something genuinely useful.
00:24
But users create an account, poke around a bit and then leave.
00:28
The features are there, people just never get to them.
00:31
We worked with an AI meeting tool that had powerful configuration options like custom templates, keyboard recognition, real time highlights.
00:39
Power users love them, but new users, they rarely even discovered these existed because nothing in the product introduced them to it.
00:47
The features were built, the path to them wasn't.
00:50
the second one, no one on the team whose actual job is to solve this.
00:55
And And I don't mean that as a criticism, it's just how startups work.
00:58
Early on, the CTO or a founder handles product decisions alongside everything else.
01:04
Maybe there's a junior designer, maybe a part time freelancer, but nobody who owns the full picture of how users experience the product.
01:11
One founder I worked with told me he'd never built an app before.
01:15
He his skill set on design was, in his own words, very, very low.
01:19
Another one had a designer in the team, but they were spread across too many projects and didn't have the seniority to push back on product decisions.
01:27
And in both cases the product worked fine technically, but the flows, the onboarding, the way features were surfaced, that part just never got the attention it needed because there was nobody whose job it was to think about it.
01:41
And the third one, really, the consequence of the first two, your metrics stall.
01:46
Users sign up but don't activate.
01:48
They try the product but don't come back.
01:50
You're adding features, running campaigns, but the numbers don't move.
01:54
One One of our clients described it as pouring water into a leaking bucket.
01:58
You can pour as much as you want, but if the bucket leaks, the water flows right back out.
02:04
The The product has the features, but how users find them, how they move through them, that's where it breaks down, and that's what's quietly leaking.
02:12
Conversions.
02:13
We've done this across AI products, video editors, compliance platforms, ad tech, apps, retail tools, and many, many more.
02:21
And the process is always the same.
02:23
We figure out where users get stuck and why.
02:26
We map the flows that cause confusion.
02:28
We prototype and test before your engineering team builds anything.
02:32
And we make core features easy to find, easy to understand, and actually used.
02:38
Everything below on this page, the case studies, the deck, the testimonials.
02:42
That's the evidence.
02:43
But if you want the short version, we close the gap between what your product can do and what your users actually experience.