You’re staring down the barrel of a Series B with the goal of scaling your company — but your product has usability challenges.

Or, you have big business goals for a 10 year old product that has suffered total stagnation in growth — and people complain that it’s hard to use.

Here’s why you should care.

Those usability challenges translate directly into a few things that impact the bottom line:

If you depend on demos (likely a B2B context) to sell your product, sales is going to have a harder time communicating your value in a 30 minute demo. Things won’t make sense, so the reps will need to answer a lot of questions. To hit targets, you’ll need more reps, more calls, more demos.

Or, sales negotiations stall because prospects think you’re too expensive — in other words, they don’t see the value of your product.

If you depend on free trials or a freemium model (likely B2C), your conversion rates will suffer as users struggle to adopt your product. Without seeing value in product, they don’t convert as readily into a paid account.

Once you’ve acquired a customer, you’ll need additional staff in your customer support and customer success in order to on board customers and answer questions. You’ll need to build and maintain a lot of product documentation, walkthroughs, send folks to client sites, or have customer service reps on lots of calls.

Conversely, if you invest in usability, then a few things follow:

• If your product’s users can onboard themselves — i.e, they can figure out how to accomplish goals without having their hands held — it will save your business time and money.
• It will increase customer conversions because they’ll see value in your product quicker.
• It will increase retention and decrease churn.
• It will decrease sales cycles.

You will need fewer sales reps to close deals because the product’s value will be readily apparent.

You will need fewer customer success and customer support reps to cover issue reports.

You will need fewer documentation writers because you’ll need less documentation.

In brief, it's a business win to invest in usability early in your product's lifecycle.