DAP uses by company stage

As your company evolves, so do your DAP needs. From collecting early customer feedback to managing complex, multi-product experiences, tailoring your DAP strategy to your company’s growth phase is crucial to avoid common evaluation mistakes along the way.

Pre Product Market-Fit

At the pre-product market fit stage, the most important aspects to improving your product's success are discovery and qualitative research. You likely still have much to learn about your target audience, jobs to be done, valuable features, and user expectations. 

It’s best to expose yourself as much as possible to your users as directly as possible, so we recommend against offering “scaled” in-app help too early.

For example, we recommend using DAPs at the pre PM-Fit stage primarily for:

Gathering feedback using microsurveys

Your users are likely highly motivated, and at this stage, your goal isn’t to optimize your UX but to deeply understand the features necessary to drive high retention and organic growth.

Some examples of microsurveys you might consider at this stage include:

Some important aspects of a DAP to consider when at this stage:

You’ll learn more about key features to look for within our evaluation section, too.

Early Product Market-Fit

Suppose you have early signals of "Product Market-Fit" (customers are paying and continuing to pay for your product and possibly finding you via word of mouth as your customers advocate for your product). In that case, you should focus on ensuring you can reduce friction and continue to capture feedback. 

At this point, you may have more users or customers than you can manually onboard or engage with via calls, so collecting feedback at scale is highly important. Microsurveys will, therefore, be critical to ensure you stay connected to your customers and don’t fall purely into quantitative tracking, thereby losing learning the “why.” 

Remember, you can collect open-ended responses and structured data that can be passed to your analytics tooling or data warehouse. You can associate these responses with the relevant user and leverage them for further analysis or targeting of other in-app experiences. 

After reaching early PM-Fit, you will likely rush to build functionality and won’t be able to optimize the UX, so you may leverage a DAP as a stop-gap to help remove friction as your new users continue to rise. 

You may also offer novel features, workflows, or concepts, so you must help your users become familiar with them. 

Consequently, some ways that you may use a DAP at this early PM-Fit stage include:

One common mistake companies make at this stage when acquiring a DAP is considering it a “project,” and enthusiasm for continued iteration wanes after the initial energy. This means that in-app experiences become stale, and no one can review, refresh, and optimize them. This is because no one is assigned accountability for their success. 

You can mitigate this by (a) clarifying who will be accountable and responsible for the ROI from a DAP—ideally not the founders, who will certainly not have the time, and (b) having a recurring meeting or process to review and improve experiences. 

When in the early PM-Fit stage, some of the key aspects to seek out in your DAP include:

Growth / Scaling

In the Growth stage, you will benefit significantly from a DAP solution. This is because your audience has grown from the initial early adopters into a wider range of personas as word and knowledge of your software have spread, leading to a large range of motivations, expectations, and abilities of people using your product. 

For example, after some funding news, you may get many “tire-kickers” interested in exploring your product but don’t have a strong need or intention to purchase it soon. When signing up for your product, their needs are very different from folks who are using a legacy product or alternative, are deeply familiar with the category, and are interested in evaluating some specific aspects to decide on an evaluation. 

It’s extremely hard to build and maintain dynamic variants of your UX based on different personas, so a DAP can help you with personalized/targeted in-app experiences:

❌ Avoid attaching broad, overarching goals such as churn reduction and retention increases to your DAP usage. Instead, break these down into specific, small goals and assign a single goal to a single in-app experience. 

First, understand the key actions in your product that cause (or correlate) with your business goals. For example, maybe you know that a user who does X is 10% more likely to complete activation, and if they do that within the first 7 days, they are 25% more likely to become a paid customer. 

In that scenario, your goal with in-product experiences is to singularly focus on improving the % of users that do X within 7 days. Do this by understanding what motivates users to do X and what prevents them from doing so, and utilize these in the copy and triggering of your in-app experiences. 

Some aspects of a DAP to consider strongly if you’re evaluating for this growth / scaling stage include:

You’ll also want to ensure buying a DAP comes with fast support and troubleshooting because, undoubtedly, your team will have questions about your specific and unique implementation and uses, and your provider should be responsive and supportive in helping you solve issues.

Mature and multi-product

Once you’re at maturity as a company (think public company or 1k+ employees), you are likely to be a critical application for many important customers and are seeking smaller incremental improvements to your key product and business metrics. You may be running many concurrent experiments or have teams dedicated to improving different aspects of the user journey.

A new consideration will be “efficiency”—how much investment is required to help onboard, activate, and retain customers, especially around the human interventions (via sales, customer success/support, etc.) needed. Therefore, you may be focussed on reducing the number of support tickets or may want to incorporate more self-serve resources for smaller customers with lower LTV for your company. 

Some smart ways to leverage DAPs to drive more efficiency include:

When running extensive in-app campaigns, it’s important not to overuse this channel and interrupt users.

Some important features within sophisticated DAPs can help avoid this, including: 

In addition, you’ll want to ensure you like your provider's Customer Success team and that they can truly add value to help your team become experts.