Everyone is familiar with the idea of a ‘sticky’ product. The concept is that the product has some kind of pervasive, addictive quality that makes it a pleasure to own.
Potential investors will be looking for the ways in which you intend to make the sales/adoption cycle very simple, short and fast. This is ‘sticky on the way in’.
Sticky on the way in: Super-easy to enrol, frictionless to integrate, amazing to use.
However, if the objective with stickiness is for the introduction of the product to be as successful as possible, it isn’t enough to simply ensure smooth customer adoption at the point of sale. The process of customer ejection (or exit) needs to be abominable. This is ‘sticky on the way out’.
Sticky on the way out: Complex to retire, troublesome to disentangle, a nightmare to give up on.
The precise manifestations of this will need to be left to your software development process, for instance ensuring that the negative aspects are not such an inconvenience that it leads to a bad reputation.
What’s important is:
- Piecing together what existing processes and systems your software may need to integrate with in order to work
- Understanding – in basic terms – what users are going to demand from a good user experience e.g. speed, simplicity, rich data, graphic, preferred platform etc.
- Making sure that the opportunity of double-sided stickiness isn’t overlooked in any discussions with software developers who will create your product.
