Your users expect that whatever app they download from you will solve a problem or satisfy a desire. That’s obvious, right? But have you considered the amount of time it takes for your customers to realize value from your app? This metric is called Time to Value (TTV) and it’s a good indicator of your business growth and operational efficiency. Over time, you want to decrease that number because the lower it is, the happier your customers are and the stronger your brand becomes.

Defining Your Time to Value

To decrease your TTV, you first need to define the moment or action in which your customer derives value from your app. 

Let’s imagine that you’ve created an app that allows online merchants to provide product filter and search capabilities to their customers. The moment a merchant gains value out of your app could be when they receive the first pieces of data from their customers’ search behavior, allowing them to make important marketing decisions. 

Looking at the B2C side of things, for Dropbox, that moment is the first time customers add a file to their shared folder. Facebook’s is when a user connects with 10 friends in the first week after signup.

You get the idea.

Deciding a target TTV varies according to your app. Sometimes onboarding can take weeks; other times users gain value immediately.

Lowering Your Time to Value = Getting in Front of More Customers and Users

Let’s look at another example. If you’ve created a CRM system and your users find the process of uploading contacts, recording conversations with leads and keeping track of sales to be cumbersome and lengthy, there’s a high probability that they’ll churn. In this case, the TTV is too long.

Concerning app marketplaces–like the Shopify App Store, Salesforce AppExchange, Apple App Store, Slack App Directory and more–TTV is critically important because if users don’t realize value quick enough, they’ll give you a bad review. Reviews are key to gaining new users’ trust and getting those highly sought-after featured spots in marketplaces (integration managers tend to recommend apps that give a lot of value to users quickly).

Having a short TTV–again, this depends on your app and industry–bolsters your reputation on these app marketplaces.

Here are some ways to shorten your TTV:

• Remove friction - identify roadblocks to value and remove them

• Improve the overall onboarding experience

  • Create onboarding goals and objectives for users to help guide them

  • Create in-application onboarding tooltips and coach marks as a guide for new users

  • Send onboarding emails

  • Offer guided task completion

• Test product usability and improve on bugs and flaws

• Hire a customer success team and use video chat for realtime help

• Provide case studies and tutorials

• Improve your app’s user interface

Different Types of Time to Value

Time to Basic Value

Time to basic value is the shortest TTV value. It’s the amount of time it takes for your customer to see the most basic amount of value from your app or solution, but they have yet to realize its full potential. Time to Basic Value can be achieved even before a purchase has been made (e.g. free trial).

Time to Exceeded Value

Just like the name suggests, Time to Exceeded Value is the amount of time it takes for users to experience value that exceeds their expectations and in turn, encourages them to be long-term customers.

Long Time to Value

A long time to value is common with SaaS products that take a couple of weeks or even months to fully onboard customers. You may offer a variety of integrations that your client needs time to find and set up before they see the true value of your product or the time to value could be based on their sales cycle.

Short Time to Value

When a user has a need and gets value within a short amount of time from using your app, your app has Short Time to Value. 

Immediate Time to Value

Certain apps will provide value to users immediately. Some of the many examples of this would be a software used for creating invoices or Slack because you can use these tools and address a need with them right away.

If you want to learn about the best ways to improve your app’s TTV and get the most out of being in SaaS app marketplaces like the Shopify App Store, our team of specialists are here to help to you.