Each hurdle you place in front of your consumer has a material impact on your business. Do you know what yours are?

We’ve wrestled with this considerably. Our current business model is based on a browser with 20% market share. Sure, we can exceed that for our partners (request our Case Study here), but that’s still a question mark for some prospects. Here are a series of questions we ask ourselves in an effort to improve the ease with which people get our product.

1. Have you identified any immediate barriers?
For us, our users need to have the Firefox browser. If they don’t have it, we give them a link to get it for free – but there’s a cost to sending that user away before they can get what they want.

2. Do you understand the waterfall of user adoption?
If you’re in the software business, you know it’s not unusual to see a 30% drop off at each step of a software download (yes, that’s a 30% drop each time you present a screen where a user must click “next”). That’s why companies work so hard at keeping the installation process simple and streamlined, and why it’s important to know the number of people who start one step and the number who start the next.

3. Have you identified how to minimize the entire number of steps for a user to get your product?
When we launched our Huffington Post branded browser, we offered both the Firefox customizations as well as a “full build” of the browser plus customizations – removing the obstacle of sending a user to get Firefox first. (The hidden cost here was we couldn’t call the browser Firefox, even though it was the same code base. Officially, it’s the Mozilla browser. So, no free lunch here.)

4. Have you listened to your clients, prospects and end users?
If you’re listening to sales objections, noting casual observations and reading user comments – you’ll get invaluable information. As a result, we’ve included a Lite version of each branded browser shipped, changed our Privacy Policy to more accurately reflect the data captured (we were over reaching with what rights we were reserving, but not using – and turning away users), launched our BOOMS to allow users to move seamlessly between our customizations and we’re continuing with some significant development efforts (more to come on this point).

Now, what are we still missing?

Tags: branded browsers, Browsers, custom browsers, firefox, Huffington Post, Mozilla Firefox, software installation | Posted in Commentary