Mini Case Study: Improve Your Product and Marketing by Paying Attention to Your Existing Users

Doorbellcode.com provides free QR doorbells that notifies you via email or phone call when a QR code is scanned. It’s a neat little app that I developed a while back when I lived on the second floor of an old building with a non-functioning intercom system.

The idea has caught on a bit (and even spawned some imitators) and continues to attract new users. For a weekend project that I built to solve my own frustration at missing deliveries, I’m pretty chuffed that others are finding it useful.

I recently discovered that some users have figured out how to send notifications from their QR doorbells to Microsoft Teams, using its ability to send emails to a channel, (Slack can apparently also do the same thing). They’ve set up a doorbellcode.com QR code for site access – visitors scan the QR at the building entrance, and staff can then let them in after being notified in a dedicated Teams channel.

Since making this discovery, I’ve noticed new users arriving who are doing the same thing – these businesses users have solved a problem (in this case, not having a convenient way for visitors to notify them of their arrival to a commercial building or worksite) with my product in an unexpected way. They are then sharing it with their peers, who are going on to sign up themselves.

While support for additional notification channels is on the development roadmap, this product was never really intended for business use, and yet, business users have become a growing part of the userbase. Going forward, I’ll be adding features to doorbellcode.com to allow for additional business use cases. At the very least, I’ll be making my product better for my existing users, while hopefully adding features that can be used to appeal to a broader audience in my marketing efforts.

While QR doorbells are a niche application, this is a great demonstration of how the concepts behind growth marketing can benefit small developers trying to evolve their product and expand their userbase. By paying attention to your existing users and how they interact with your product, you can identify new potential audiences, prioritize new features and improvements based on what they need, and focus your marketing messaging on your most valuable user demographics.