How Landing Builds a Community-Led Platform with Survicate

For Gen Zers, social media is all about authenticity, fun, and having a safe space. Multiple studies confirm they’re not interested in their network updates or perfect Instagram lifestyle. They’ve seen it all, and being the first truly digital-native generation, they can smell fake from far away.

That’s why they appreciate Landing so much, calling it “the kindest place on the Internet.” As a community-led company, Landing listens and aligns with its users. The aim is to create an authentic alternative to the “legacy” social media channels.

The community has been the core interest of Landing from the very beginning. But how does Landing know what's best for its users?

With Survicate!

Survicate helps Landing collect continuous user feedback from various touchpoints. This way, Landing can be mindful of its community needs and react quickly to any flaws.

Read on to get the whole juice ⤵️

What is Landing?

Landing is the first social platform developed with and for Gen Z to feel creative and connected. An oasis from ad-bogged and sponsored content, Landing allows users to express how they feel – not how they look, the number of followers, or likes – by creating visual and shoppable boards that spark connection, emotion, and inspiration across its growing +200k global Landingverse community. 

As Miri Buckland—one of the founders—points out, Landing has always been driven by “unlocking creativity through the community.” Yet, the initial idea behind Landing has evolved from a creative studio to design physical spaces.

In short, Landing offered a one-stop-shop option for designing and furnishing apartments. So you were already set up when arriving at your new flat. What set Landing apart from similar companies was its design studio. It allowed you to visualize your new home with pieces from the product library.

And then the pandemic hit. Landing’s team realized that they wouldn’t be at anybody’s house any time soon. First, they remodeled their concept—from local to nationwide. Next, they added a much-requested feature— uploading personal assets.

That’s when they noticed sprouts of the new.

“We started to see people uploading the craziest things and creating boards about things not related to furniture. And that's what led us down a more flexible mood board path, rather than just focusing on furniture.”

- Katherine Crutchfield, UXR Lead at Landing

At that point, the app didn't have a public feed yet. Nonetheless, they saw those new verticals blossom on individual creator boards. And all of a sudden, Landing became so much more than just about interior design—a creative platform with the freedom to play, where users could visually express themselves.

Community pulse

From the beginning, Landing stressed its tight bonds to the community around it. It started with a small Slack channel, later migrated to Discord—now home to the super users. Along with that, though, the team wanted to know how the rest of the community felt about the platform.

That’s when Survicate came to play.

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Product-Market Fit survey

Inspired by the Superhuman app’s story, they set out to measure product-market fit for Landing.

As Katherine recalls,

“We became interested in the ability to hear directly from users on how we're meeting their needs and learn how to ultimately reach product-market fit. It led us to find a solution that could allow us to ask those types of questions. And that's how we landed on Survicate.”

A product-market fit survey measures the level of fit between a product or service and its target market. It does it by asking a straightforward question: “How would you feel if you could no longer use [our product]?” You conduct it to gather feedback about a product or service to see if it meets users' expectations.

The product-market fit survey is a basic health check for Landing’s value proposition. It also gives a ton of qualitative feedback which is analyzed and transformed into new roadmap items.

“It tells us what features our users want,” Liz points out. Moreover, the UXR team regularly uses this information to funnel it through all other user research. They share that feedback with the Product team, which informs Landing’s roadmap weekly. 

Liz concludes,

“It’s interesting to see what was consistent about that data, what was new, how it was evolving, and how the value we were providing to our community changed as the platform itself evolved. It also tells us where there might be gaps between what we might THINK users want and what they actually wanted - without this feedback, we're looking at an ocean through a straw.”

The product-market fit survey provides a handful of insights to keep the Product team busy. It also sheds light on broader changes, like the generational shift Landing experienced.

From Millennials to Gen Z

The continuous feedback Landing’s team has been gathering led to interesting outcomes. Landing began as an interior design platform, primarily targeting professionals in their thirties. When the company moved towards a creative community space, it attracted a different age group—Gen Z.

They value Landing for being an alternative to the existing social media landscape. They no longer use it to stay in touch with their peers but rather to consume entertaining content. In this context, Liz sees Landing as the future of social media. A space “which is niche and interest-based as opposed to network-based. Community over the often performative nature of social media. Authenticity over how social media tends to be.” [quote from Gen-Zine]

New generation, new needs, though.

“One of the biggest requests we've seen was for the mobile app. It is something that we didn't really see in the early days with a home design focus. Now, with a younger user base, that's critical to those using Landing today. It has been a huge project that we've been working on for the last half year, and we just launched it in March! It is really cool to see. And, yeah, it was just a great insight to know that that's something that people were so excited about.”

- Katherine Crutchfield, UXR Lead at Landing

Creative tooling requests

Putting the generational issues aside, there was a feature request that fired up the community. And for a reason. As Landing’s design studio allows you to create collage-like mood boards, cropping was at the top of users' expectations for a long time.

“At a certain point, it was almost kind of a joke because we heard it week over week over week, and we knew it was so important to people. And with our tight product prioritization, we were really trying to do what was right for us at the time. But Crandall, our Head of Design, pushed for cropping to be a holiday gift last year. So it was a surprise to our team and our creators, which was super exciting because we knew from Survicate that it would be a huge deal to our creators.”

- Katherine Crutchfield, UXR Lead at Landing

Where are the users coming from?

Apart from being community-centered, Landing is also a data-driven company. That’s why it was so frustrating when they couldn’t figure out where their users were coming from. Mixpanel’s data was distorted, showing the users were coming from direct search, and they were, but it was just a part of the story. And to top that, the inconclusive part.

That’s when Liz and Katherine customized the product-market fit survey to get the data straight.

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“And that was a game changer. Even though it was self-reported data, it started telling us that people were coming from TikTok and Pinterest, which was not on our radar before. That information helped us figure out how to prioritize some of those top-of-funnel channels and where we needed to double down vs. scale back our work.”

- Liz Friedland, Head of Community at Landing

Feedback Button

Liz and Katherine installed the Feedback Button to streamline insights from their design studio. It's another point of contact with their community—crucial for the Landing team.

“Users spend the most time in the studio, and that's where the button is accessible. This is great because it tells us what people are currently struggling with. It shows their biggest pain point when they're trying to create a board. For us, getting a user from creating in the studio to publishing their board is vital because it's the conversion point of becoming a Landing-loving user.”

- Katherine Crutchfield, UXR Lead at Landing

It helps solve issues and bugs that slip through the cracks.

“It's uncovered things that we wouldn't know about otherwise. There was one thing that was affecting many people that I had never experienced. No one on our team had experienced it either. On some device types, you couldn't scroll through our Community Image Library. This was a huge issue because the library has millions of items for users to create boards with. And if a user can't scroll and access those items, they can't create a board easily.”

- Katherine Crutchfield, UXR Lead at Landing

It only affected users with devices of specific screen sizes. The Product team was able to pinpoint and resolve the bug.

Katherine assures,

“If we hadn't been hearing it bubble up through the Feedback Button, we wouldn't have had any way of knowing about it.”

Complementing the tool stack

To stay close to their users, Liz and Katherine use a handful of different technologies integrated with Survicate. One of them is FullStory.

“I use FullStory hand in hand with Survicate. It's given us a chance to peer over a user's shoulder and see what they're doing within a session. And that, in combination with hearing what users are reporting through Survicate, has been huge.”

- Katherine Crutchfield, UXR Lead at Landing

Survicate provokes digging deeper into the data, whereas FullStory allows watching user sessions. It helps to understand the issue they might have. At the same time, it “shows what users are spending the most time trying to figure out and what we could simplify,” as Katherine explains.

One final touch to the tech stack Landing uses to analyze the user data is Segment. It structures it in a user-friendly manner to make it easy to digest.

“Segment sends our events to Survicate, allowing us to target users more specifically. So, for example, we don't blast the product-market survey to everyone the first time they enter Landing, but we delay it to their second session. We don't want to overwhelm users with loads of pop-ups, so Segment allows us to create a smoother experience.”

- Katherine Crutchfield, UXR Lead at Landing

With this 360° view of users and their activity within Landing, Liz and Katherine can focus on polishing the user journey. The goal is to adapt their product to the actual needs of their much-beloved community.

Wrapping up

Although Landing is still at the early stage of start-up development, it built a strong community around the product.

The company followed an organic transition from an interior design tool to a creative community space that appealed to Gen Zers, disillusioned with the existing social media channels. Authenticity and dedication to hearing and acting upon users' needs kindled their trust and engagement.

Under the hood, all this was powered by gathering continuous customer feedback and acting upon it without shortcuts. Survicate has been one of the key players here. Both Liz and Katherine admit,

“We truly do build with our community, and so the tools that help us do that are so precious to us. Liz and I are huge Survicate nerds for a very good reason.”

And although their tool stack may seem complex, it’s based on simplicity. 

• Landing collects most user feedback with their evergoing product-market fit survey customized to current needs. 
• They also use the Feedback Button, which provides insights directly from the design studio. 
• Landing’s team employed FullStory, natively integrated with Survicate, to better see how users interact with the platform for even sharper results. 
• Finally, they use Segment to better target the surveys sent out to the users. It works marvelously when building precise user groups. 

Altogether, it’s a well-oiled user-centered machine. 

Become a Survicate nerd too! Check how to collect quality customer feedback more efficiently with our survey software. Start surveying now!

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✨✨✨ Landing sunset on September 18, 2024. The founding team that developed the product, including featured Liz Friedland and Katherine Crutchfield moved on to create a new product called Zeen, a platform for visual, shoppable blogs. ✨✨✨