■ My thoughts on incentives for customer research

Up: § Buffer thoughts and decisions
Up: § Business philosophies

In response to Nathan Nannenga in the prod-team channel, May 24th (link)

A few of my thoughts on this, I hope this can help a little with context and understanding my philosophy:

• We’ve dabbled with incentives in the past, and I’ve never felt great about it. I personally think that there are some much better ways to drive engagement and excitement to connect with us than financial or non-Buffer related gifts / rewards. So I’m personally glad that those explorations were short-lived and we’re back to no incentive.
• That said, “no incentive” is really short-changing ourselves. What I mean by that is, if we show that we are an engaged, nimble, actively developed product and we have a team that connects with customers, acts on feedback and circles back to present those improvements we’ve made, then really, we have already built a big incentive for anyone to connect with us.
• This is the ongoing work we must keep up (this work exists everywhere, but especially in Marketing, Advocacy, Product, Social / Community and anywhere we have opportunities to connect directly with customers).
• If we keep this work up, and we maintain that bar, then it is evident to customers and observers, and as a result they will already have an incentive to connect and contribute, because they have seen evidence that doing so actually can make a difference to the product that they’re using.