Cloud Storage / SaaS
14 interviews. 627 responses. One anxiety-driven moment that changed the whole opportunity.
The blind spot
Assuming you know why non-users aren't converting, and prioritizing the roadmap around a guess instead of the real friction.
The challenge
Understand why people outside the platform weren't converting, specifically at the moment they receive a shared file from someone who is already a customer.
What I did
Recruited and interviewed 14 non-users across two segments: people who regularly received files from platform users but had never created accounts themselves
Focused each conversation on the moment of file receipt: what people thought, what worried them, what made them trust the sender or not
Validated qualitative findings with a 627-person quantitative survey to confirm the pattern held at scale and wasn't an artifact of the small interview sample
Identified the specific friction driving non-conversion: not missing features, but an anxiety-driven moment of trust evaluation that the product hadn't been designed around
What changed
From missing features to a trust moment nobody had mapped.
The real story wasn't about missing features. It was about an anxiety-driven moment: deciding whether to trust an incoming file. That single insight reframed the opportunity around things like single sign-on, version tracking, and embedded sender context, instead of more storage features nobody asked for. The research didn't just identify a different problem. It pointed to a different kind of solution, one built around sender identity and context rather than storage capacity.
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