We’re back! Here’s what our team has been working on since our last monthly update.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here’s the ideal profile of the initial users we’re after.
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!
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. — Zak Pines, VP of Marketing, Bedrock Data
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
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