By Geoff Roberts 6 min read
We’re back! Here’s what our team has been working on since our last monthly update.
We built our customer support and knowledge base tools
While we focused primarily on building our email marketing tools (email broadcasts and drip email campaigns) in Q1, we shifted our attention to building our customer support and knowledge base tools moving into Q2. The knowledge base tool is a searchable and easily organized home for product documentation and “how-to” content. It will be home to our own product documentation content shortly - we’re focusing on building out the “must-have” content that we’ll need to support the launch of our product. This will mostly focus around things like how to register for an Outseta account, how to reset your password, and documentation around how things like People, Accounts, Segments, and Custom Properties work in Outseta.
On the customer support side, we built a customer support ticketing system. Dave, Dimitris, and myself got together in Boston and spent a couple of days tearing apart customer support tools including Zendesk, Intercom, and Groove to inspire our own design. Here’s how our own ticketing system works.
- Any customer of ours can email support(at)outseta.com with any sort of customer service inquiry or question. They don’t have to navigate to any particular URL, screen, or form to submit a customer service request; they can simply send us an email from their email client.
- We receive the request in the “Support” section of Outseta. The email’s subject line displays as the topic of the ticket, and the body of the email shows up as the content of the ticket. We can then easily assign the ticket to anyone on our team and respond to the inquiry.
- Our response shows up as a personal, 1-on-1 email in the customer’s email inbox from whoever responded to the ticket.
While the support ticketing system is our first customer service oriented tool, it’s also worth noting that we’ve already taken into consideration how we are going to layer in support interactions from other channels in the future; for example chat requests and social media interactions.
We’re working towards a September launch date
One of the challenges that we face as we’re building our minimum viable product is that we can’t truly deliver on our stated value proposition until we’ve built basic tools across all the different functions of our product; CRM, email marketing, customer support and knowledge base, subscription billing, and reporting. While that remains true, we’re eager to get some real world user feedback. On top of that, we feel like what we’ve built so far - our CRM, email marketing, and customer support and knowledge base tools - would provide real value to an early stage SaaS business.
With that in mind we’re planning to launch the first paid version of our product including those components in September. There are a few reasons that we made this decision.
- We think there’s value in what we’ve built. We’ll be able to start getting real world user feedback and testing our initial customer acquisition strategies sooner by taking this route.
- While this functionality is already built, this gives us some time to work out details around things like account registration, product documentation, pricing, and billing.
- By publicizing our intention to launch this first wave of functionality in September, you will all help hold us accountable to that date!
The plan thereafter is to focus on our subscription billing and reporting functionality. By the end of 2017 we should have our minimum viable product complete, we should be delivering on our stated value proposition, and we should be ready to make waves.
We need your help! We’re looking for referrals to a handful of beta users.
With our September launch date officially out there on the horizon, we are starting to look for a handful of companies that would like to be “beta users” of our product. I put “beta users” in quotations because I think it really undersells what we’re after... “congrats, here’s your opportunity to be our test dummy!” Here’s what we are able to offer to any company that is referred to us.
- A basic, functional tool encompassing CRM, email marketing, support, and knowledge base tools.
- No cost - your Outseta account will be free for life.
- An advisor to your business. Dave, Dimitris, and I will make ourselves available to help you with your business in any way that we can. Just as you are helping us work out the kinks with our technology, we’ll lend your business our collective experience in everything from engineering to go-to-market strategy.
Here’s the ideal profile of the initial users we’re after.
- Ideally an early stage, SaaS business. If you’re at day one, that’s great. If you’re a little further along and are already using some point solutions but are willing to make the switch to Outseta, that’s great too - we’ll work with you to make that transition as painless as possible (we recently went through this process ourselves).
- If not a SaaS business, other subscription businesses could also be a great fit. Subscription “box” businesses (think BirchBox or Blue Apron) or subscription content businesses, for example, would likely be a good fit.
- If not a subscription business of some sort, any early stage business with a need for basic CRM, email marketing, and customer support tools could also be valuable to us.
So to put the ball in your court… do you know anybody that we should be talking to? You can email us or send introductions directly to either geoff, dave, or dimitris @outseta.com. If we start working with someone that you refer to us we’ll be A) forever indebted to you, and B) will pay it forward in some awesome way when Outseta takes off!
Further validation of what we’re building
While we’re eager to bring on some beta users and start running some customer acquisition programs to further validate our idea, it always feels good when external sources provide validation that we’re on to something. That happened a couple of times recently. The first was an unsolicited email from the Head of Growth at a Boston based start-up. Perhaps most importantly, this email came from someone that neither Dimitris, Dave, or I knew.
That one felt good! Another came from Zak Pines, VP of Marketing at Bedrock Data. Bedrock Data is solving a similar problem to Outseta, but with a different approach and generally a focus on later stage companies. I recently interviewed Zak on our blog (check it out!), but the excerpt from the conversation below stood out.
“What’s interesting to me about Outseta is you’re going to be marketing to smaller companies, start-up companies that don’t already have these (SaaS) systems in place, and that’s the right time to address the issue. As you layer on more and more systems, it becomes more and more challenging. If you can start your business with that integrated view, you’re going to be in a much stronger position to deliver on closed-loop reporting, ensure a really great customer experience, and keep your teams aligned from the start.”
That’s our progress report for May - if you are willing and able, please remember to hit us with any referrals of beta users that you think could benefit from our product. Thank you in advance.
Onward!
-Dimitris, Dave, & Geoff