Day 115: Ask and ye shall receive

product

Several days ago, Intention had 25 reviews on Firefox Add-ons:

Today, Intention has 111:

How did I get so many reviews so quickly? Especially when I don’t have that many users?

Pick your favorite explanation:

(A) I doctored the screenshots above to make myself look more impressive

(B) I succumbed to temptation and paid some review-writing farm to post a bunch of fake reviews

(C) These options are dumb

If you chose C, you’re correct!!!

The real explanation is pretty boring: I simply asked.

After 5 days of usage, Intention shows this modal in addition to the normal lock screen:

And it works really well. I don’t have exact CTR numbers because I don’t include analytics in Intention, but it’s incredible that over 100 people took the time to add a rating / write a review out of 1,500 active users (note: a portion of those users haven’t had the prompt activate yet). Thank you to everyone who did so!!! 🙏🏽

Note: This number differs from the “842 users” in the other screenshot because in most places, Mozilla shows the “average daily users”, whatever that means. I have no idea how that’s calculated and why Mozilla doesn’t just show the daily user number.

Note: This number differs from the "842 users" in the other screenshot because in most places, Mozilla shows the "average daily users", whatever that means. I have no idea how that's calculated and why Mozilla doesn't just show the daily user number.

(Aside: I just found the option to make Intention stats on Firefox publicly viewable, so feel free to dig around! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/intention/statistics/?last=7)

I included this prompt after seeing it in Inbox When Ready, one of the extensions that inspired me to build Hide Feed, another one of my extensions. There are several aspects to it that I think make it effective:

  • Personal: I’m writing as myself instead of as some faceless company, and I think that makes the request more appealing.
  • Timely: The prompt shows up after the user has had enough time to use the extension and benefit from it. (I’m sure you could run some A/B tests to figure out at what point people are most excited about the product and therefore most willing to write a review / share with their friends, but I frankly don’t care enough about optimizing this to look into that.)
  • Non-blocking: On mobile, these sorts of review prompts can be annoying because they get in the way of whatever you’re trying to do. I try to avoid that as much as possible with my prompt so that people can continue unhindered without interacting with the review prompt. Still, some people will strongly dislike any prompt of this sort. (Here’s what someone wrote for their reason for uninstalling Hide Feed: “I wanted to hide the feed, not get a banner begging for ratings.”)

What I’ve learned is that many people are down to help out, but it’s not always obvious how they can do so. So sometimes, you just need to point them in the right direction.