How SparkToro rebuilt their product and reduced risk with voice-of-customer research

A story about mitigating product risk, charting a new path, and re-connecting with what customers care about
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“I don’t just recommend [DemandMaven] to everyone because we’re friends. I do it because [they’re] really f*cking good at this stuff.”

Rand Fishkin

CEO & Co-Founder, SparkToro

Highlights

  • Conducted and analyzed 19 customer interviews
  • Conducted and analyzed 11 UX interviews
  • Supported feature prioritization for the new roadmap
  • Collaborated on UX adjustments for improved adoption

Services Provided

  • Customer research & interviews
  • UX research & interviews
  • Thematic analysis and coding of interviews
  • Jobs-To-Be-Done mapping based on outcomes of customers
  • Product-Opportunities mapping

The Company

Transforming audience research for agencies & marketers

Co-founders Rand Fishkin (co-founder and previous CEO of Moz, co-founder of Inbound.org, and author of Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World) and Casey Henry (previously Moz, Wistia, Hubspot, and Ookla) started SparkToro because they believed everyone should have access to high-quality market and audience research. Their platform, which allows marketers and strategists to discover where their audience hangs out, topics they care about, queries they search for, YouTube channels they subscribe to, etc. entered the market with a bang in 2020.

Then, in 2023, things got interesting. Casey and Rand were in the unique position of having to rebuild the product from scratch. Nearly everything on the back-end had to change, and so did a lot of the features and functionality of the app thanks to a fundamental change in how SparkToro’s data was acquired. But there was a silver lining lurking beneath this technical challenge. True to his nature as a smart and empathetic leader, Rand realized this was the perfect time to dig deep and understand what SparkToro’s customers really wanted, what their ideal outcomes were, and the jobs they needed to do inside the product. From there, the team could figure out what features they could replace and what new value they could provide to users.

That’s where DemandMaven came in. After undergoing a series of Jobs To Be Done (JTBD)-style interviews and analysis conducted by DemandMaven, Rand and VP of Marketing, Amanda Natividad, were able to use the insights in a variety of practical applications. One of the most important outcomes of DemandMaven’s work was using customer feedback to validate their hunches about the product direction they wanted to head in, gaining feedback from customers about some initial wireframes, and identifying both marketing and product growth opportunities.

As Rand puts it, “I don’t just recommend Asia to everyone because we’re friends. I do it because she’s really f-ing good at this stuff.”

The Challenge

Re-building a product from the ground up, with no time to lose

SparkToro is an audience research platform that helps marketers and strategists analyze and understand the behaviors and demographics of any online audience. At the time of its inception, Twitter was one of only a few major social media networks that SparkToro pulled data from to help its users learn about their potential customers. But major changes at Twitter’s headquarters meant SparkToro – and their customers – would no longer have access to that valuable data. For Rand and Casey, this meant starting fresh, and re-envisioning a better, more powerful tool with reduced integration-dependency.

“We had lost access to our core dataset, and so we needed a new system to be able to provide data. To do that, we had to really deeply understand what our customers wanted, what their outcomes were from the product, the jobs that they needed to do inside the product, the thing that they subscribed to us for. Then, [we could] figure out what [features we] could afford to lose, and what we really needed to build in this new one,” Rand said.

For Rand, this opportunity felt like déjà vu. It was the chance to go back to the very inception of SparkToro, to that phase between ideation and launch when he and Casey were doing their own customer discovery.

“Customer discovery for me was an 18-month process that I spent the first year and a half of SparkToro’s life doing manually. Lots of in-person, lots phone calls, lots of video calls, all that kind of stuff. But we had to go back to the drawing table as it were,” Rand added.

There were obvious drawbacks to completing the process alone, especially during this critical time in the business’s trajectory. For one thing, they didn’t have eighteen months to lose. The manual work of coordinating and transcribing calls would take them away from their primary focus — which was product development. Second, conducting interviews on their own would likely produce biased results.

“We really needed help because as my co-founder, Casey, often says – when people talk to me, especially because I have a presence and brand in the marketing world, a lot of our customers will not give me or us directly the answers that they would give a third party like [DemandMaven],” Rand said.

No matter how you look at it, relaunching the product came with risk. Any changes they made to the product had the potential to alienate existing users. Hitting the right balance between keeping those customers happy and attracting a new audience would take careful consideration.

Rand explained, “Because of the unique situation that we had where we had lost access to this core data and we had to rebuild the app, we were essentially in a space where if we were very successful in getting lots of people to enjoy the product as it was then, we would quickly lose that. All those people would be disappointed by a new product. Customer discovery and customer empathy and understanding the core problems of our audience surfaced as much more important, much more high value for the long term of the business.”

The Solution

Actionable primary insights from a third-party provider

For Rand, the choice to go with DemandMaven was an easy one. He was acutely aware how his passion for his work, and notoriety in the industry, could affect their customer’s interview responses. It was a risk he didn’t want to take.

“I recognize two things are true. One is when I show people SparkToro, our features, our product, what it can do for them, I am very excited about that, and therefore it is infectious. Problem number one is me.

 

Problem number two is everyone else and their perception of me, Amanda, and even Casey, which is that when you talk to people who work at a company on a product, you have an innate human desire to make them feel good about the thing that they put their life’s work into. It’s just how it is. There’s very few people who can have that level of directness and honesty with someone who they know worked on the thing.

 

So, it is fantastic to hire third parties who are deeply experienced at asking the right kinds of customer research questions and talking to people in honest and truthful ways that get honest and truthful responses. That’s a superpower. It’s a superpower that you can’t have inside the company,” Rand explained.

Amanda, SparkToro’s fearless marketing leader, approached the idea of bringing in an expert like Asia from a slightly different POV, ultimately arriving at the same conclusion. To not only have an extra set of hands available, but also get an inside look at that person’s finely tuned process and procedures would be an advantage, plain and simple.

“Being the only employee, I think what I was looking for was also just to have another perspective from a marketing and growth expert who knows and thinks and does things that I don’t do. I actually just wanted to work with a really experienced and proven marketer, [to] understand how she thinks, which problems she uncovers, how she would go about fixing them.”

 

Amanda continued, “I wanted to learn from Asia. I wanted direction, more specificity, really concrete things from the interviews…which we got.”

There was one more consideration that popped up for SparkToro as they thought about hiring a customer research expert: How would they translate their findings to the work they needed to do, re-building their product for an expanded audience?

Amanda explained, “It’s also being able to interpret all [the data] and make it actionable for us. It really is a gift to be able to take [people’s] answers and turn them into something that makes sense for us that we can do something with, so we’re not stuck sitting there reading, ‘Oh, I hate this, I hate that.’”

For the SparkToro team, DemandMaven was their first choice for a research provider. DemandMaven is a strategic growth consulting firm that helps growing companies and startups troubleshoot their growth and find their absolute best growth opportunities. Once the decision to go with DemandMaven became clear, Rand and Amanda synced up with the DemandMaven team and created an action plan based on the unique goals of the company.

In addition to conducting a series of interviews, Asia and her team put together a Growth Playbook that served as a homebase for gathered information and existing data, and laid out a strategy as well as experiments for improving the most critical growth KPIs.

The Result

Insights-driven product updates and prioritized backlog of opportunities

With the help of DemandMaven’s research, providing the much-needed primary data SparkToro needed to reconfigure the technical back-end of their app, the company had a successful relaunch and continues to see positive results.

“Now, we are two and a half months into the new version of the product, and we are essentially rebuilding our audience and customer base. We have actually gone up instead of down, which is surprising and quite a blessing. But I think it speaks to a lot of the features that we chose to prioritize and build and the data sets we chose to include. All of that insight came from the work that DemandMaven did both analyzing our customer data and usage data. And also through the surveys and interviews,” Rand explained.

While it’s early days for the new and improved SparkToro app, Rand specifically cited the customer research performed by Asia and her team with helping them realize three “actionable and different” business outcomes:

1. The decision to drop a specific social media account search, saving them months of development time and enabling the app to launch three months earlier than they would have otherwise been able to go live. The SparkToro team arrived at this conclusion with Asia after looking at historic usage data and talking to actual customers. The “aha moment” came when they realized that their most valuable customers didn’t actually care as much about social media account search as they anticipated. “That was huge,” Rand said.

2. Figuring out what features from their existing roadmap to prioritize post-launch. One of the biggest features they prioritized was the report builder, and the second was the comparison visualization. While both features are still in development, they’re high in the stack. Rand explained, “I don’t know when or if we ever would’ve gotten to them if it hadn’t been for that prioritization. I think we would’ve focused on a tracking feature instead, which is harder to build – and from DemandMaven’s research, seems to be less impactful than [the other two features]. I’m excited to see how it goes.”

3. Third, the discovery of a few brand new features that they’re planning to include in the app – like search keywords and topics of interest. SparkToro launched Search Keywords in Q2 2024 and Audience Topics in Q4. “We [had the mindset that] we don’t want to become an SEO product. We don’t want people to think of this as just being about search. But what we discovered from the research is that lots of people who are not in SEO or PPC still want the keywords people search for and the topics they care about to use in their content strategy. They want to have empathy for their customers, figure out what their audience is interested in, figure out topic areas to create email newsletters about or go pitch conferences about or create sponsorships around. Thank goodness we did that! I think the topics and keyword sections are now two of the most popular features in the app,” Rand added.

It’s common in the customer research process for founders to test previously held assumptions about their customers and product. Without access to real users who are willing to speak honestly with a third-party like Asia and her team, they are apt to continue on instincts alone.

From the marketing side of things, Amanda was able to put the DemandMaven research to use immediately, updating the website experience and re-imagining the product page.

“I’m seeing that a lot of what DemandMaven did informs the website experience now, the homepage and the product page, which I love. I feel like when I show people our overview page, when I run a search and I scroll through it, it’s really easy for me to convey to them, ‘Here’s what you could do with this.’

Several of the interview sources turned out to be happy customers that SparkToro has since contacted directly. Hearing users’ stories first-hand is an incredible way for marketing teams to understand the power of their software and the tangible impact it has on their customers’ businesses.

“There were at least a couple people where Asia emailed us after the interview and said, ‘Hey, I think you should talk to this person about a case study because they have a really amazing story.’ Or, ‘Hey, you should talk to this person about a testimonial because they are a raving SparkToro fan and have something that’s super relevant to a bunch of other customers like them,’” Rand said.

Amanda confirmed, “There is at least one that I did do a case study with, which is a nice, ‘Yes! This thing got done.’”

“I’m seeing that a lot of what DemandMaven did informs the website experience now, the homepage and the product page, which I love. I feel like when I show people our overview page, when I run a search and I scroll through it, it’s really easy for me to convey to them, ‘Here’s what you could do with this.’

Amanda Natividad

VP of Marketing, SparkToro

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This sh*t ain’t easy, but that’s exactly why we built DemandMaven. We’ll help you find your absolute best growth opportunities based on the “jobs” your customers are hiring the product for. Then, we’ll show you exactly what needs to happen to achieve your goals.