When good comms aren't good enough

I may not be Deloitte or Michelin or Unesco or any of the other cool accounts that use Paperform, but I still think I'm a dream enough customer. I've recommended the form builder to basically everyone I work with, I've hosted some products there for years, and back when they had a referral program, I had a little pitch that I'd copy and paste from my Stickies.

Yet, I missed one of their biggest launch in years (an entire new product!) for four entire months.

Not because they botched it. Diony McPherson, Paperform's co-founder, walked me through the Stepper rollout on last week's episode of Churn Flags, and it was the whole playbook: Product Hunt, socials, SEO groundwork, referral sources, newsletters, in-app banners... the works.

This is a company whose Aussie founders set alarms every two or three hours at night in the early years so they could answer live chat for US customers. Their comms are g-o-o-d.

I missed all of it anyway.

Announcements keep your schedule. Habit keep theirs.

Every announcement is calendar-based; they land when you ship. For these announcements to work, the launch window has to overlap with the customer's attention window — and attention windows close constantly, for reasons that have nothing to do with you: A vacation. Their own launch. Parental leave. An assistant (increasingly, an AI agent) deciding which emails deserve a human.

Any single broadcast only catches whoever happens to be around that week.

Run that math across a whole customer base and a "successful" feature launch misses most of the people it was built for. Not because they weren't interested. Because they weren't standing at the window when the announcement flew past.

My forms were running fine, so I had no reason to log in. An assistant was triaging my inbox, so the launch emails never reached my eyes.

So how did I finally find Stepper? On an ordinary day, I went into my integrations tab to connect a form to my email platform — and there it was, sitting in the exact place it belonged, at the exact moment I had the need it could solve.

That's the more effective move: behavioral triggers. A placement within the product – in a spot that the customer visits when they're about to do exactly what your feature solves – doesn't care what week it is. Plus? It's patient. An announcement decays the moment it's sent; a triggered placement compounds, catching someone new every day, indefinitely. Four months late, in my case, and Paperform didn't have to lift a finger to earn my adoption.

I've been shouting from the rooftops for years about behavioral flows (starting from when it sunk in that the 64% increase in paid upgrades I earned Doodle was less from my snarky copywriting and more from our strategic behavioral mapping, womp womp) – and with the plethora of in-app capabilities these days, we've only increased the surface area.

The launch, replayed

"If we launch and it flops, which happens to a lot of people, you can always just relaunch." Diony's launch philosophy is both realistic and persistent – and because we do still need to launch, it's the best way to give your calendar-based channels behavioral trigger traction. Enough sends, and eventually one lands inside an open window.

But placement is the cheaper, better version of the same move: one relaunch that never stops relaunching. So before you write the next launch announcement, list your touchpoints. The integrations tab. The template gallery. The export screen. The billing page. You can even work backward from the error message they'd hit right before your new feature would have saved them.

Every product or feature has a handful of places customers walk into holding a specific need, and we earn more attention if we take advantage of them.

The other 2/3

The Stepper story is just a third of my conversation with Diony (and it came as a total surprise).

We open every episode of Churn Flags with a customer review – the Paperform one was asking them to become Qualtrics – and my opening diagnosis did not survive its first two minutes. (You should hear Diony take it down live, rather than read it here. She's so polished.)

Plus the rename experiment I pitched that got the fastest, most well-reasoned no I've gotten on a branding move (ten years of SEO equity will do that).

Plus what happened when Paperform's Swiss Army knife analogy meant nothing to customers.

And finally, the experiment Diony did pick, not to mention the one that had already shipped the morning we recorded.

Watch the whole thing on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple.

– Nikki

P.S. Let me know what you think of this podcast writeup. I have a fancy new preference center so you can pick which types of podcast updates you get from me, but it needs a bit more work before going live. So, be a little old school and hit reply?