Building for the Right Users

While products are largely responsible for the value they create, it misses an important variable: the users using them.

Users are not only recipients of value, but also participants in value creation. The potential return of your product is contingent on your user’s knowledge, skill, and taste. The same software product adopted by a different set of users can produce meaningfully different outcomes.

This is one of the most under-appreciated factors behind Framer’s success, and one that becomes clear when observing how its product, users, and outcomes have evolved together.

What has granted Framer its “stunning website” heuristic is as much Framer’s product capabilities as the designers using it. A Framer website is not stunning by default. It is stunning because of the designer creating it.

In the context of Framer, every stunning website is an artifact of Framer’s ROI. Designers tend to be the users with the creative vision, taste, and care required to make websites great. They have the greatest sensibility for the tools they use, and the capabilities to use them well. The choice to curate Framer’s product, marketing, and incentive programs specifically for designers is a strategy to optimise outcomes - both for customers (better websites) and the business (brand heuristic).

User choice is simultaneously the foundation of all investment decisions, and a consequence of them. Users inform strategy, but strategy also informs the types of users a product attracts and retains. You can proactively select your users by making decisions that will organically filter for who you want to curate for - from your interface design, to your storytelling, and distribution channels. If you do not choose your users, the market will choose them for you.

Choosing the right users is not about excluding users. It is about deciding where to focus attention and resources based on what is most strategically valuable at any moment in time. Users can be selected based on their propensity to produce the best outcomes, but also based on other measures of return. This can include the exposure they provide, the brand heuristic they reinforce, the status they signal, the credibility they lead with, the advocacy they generate, and more. The ROI of a user is more than what they pay for. Taking a more expansive view of customer ROI is what allows you to better inform your user choice, and benefit from it.

The lesson I learned from my time at Framer is therefore that great product matters, but choosing the right users to build for can matter just as much. The outcomes a product enables are inseparable from the users producing them. You might as well make sure you get the best users to drive the best outcomes on your behalf.

The most enduring companies are the result of a continuous feedback loop between their products, users, and outcomes those users produce. Choose the users who will showcase how good your product is and can be. Your business potential depends on it.