GUEST ENTRY: So essential, yet so hard. Contractbook is letting us in on their secrets of securing loyal customers and killing the printers.
Hi, we’re Contractbook! Our product is developed in collaboration with our awesome costumers and we thought we’d share with you some of our insights! Enjoy!
You have been sitting in your parents’ basement for years, analysing the market, planning your strategy, and polishing your product until utmost perfection. No one has ever seen it, but you have a clear idea of what the world needs.
You will enter in style, conquer the market, get a unicorn valuation within a few years, and sell your booming business to a powerful man wearing flip-flops. Then you retire to some paradisiacal tax haven, so you can finally enjoy yourself by the poolside with a piña colada fountain and some nymph that might be kind of underage. But who is counting, right?
Sure, it might work. But not for us at Contractbook. Our way towards the free flowing piña colada fountain is to develop our product gradually and in collaboration with the users — cultivating a product that we don’t have the imagination to envision ourselves. That’s how we aim to deserve the loyalty of our customers.
Vertically vs Horisontally
But before we come to that, it might be appropriate to introduce ourselves properly. In short, Contractbook is an all-in-one work agreement solution that aims to provide a simple, transparent, and effective workflow with easy templates and digital storage with seamless imports. No feathers, no ink, no paper and more importantly no more fucking printers!
In our previous software development company, we used to find ourselves constantly wasting time handling contracts the old fashioned way: writing, mailing, printing, signing, scanning, mailing, printing, signing, scanning, mailing and then keeping it in some random email thread or a binder in our office, that might get lost in fires or relocations.
So… what was the strategy again?
Well, instead of introducing the entire world to a product we did not know the value of, we chose to publish a rudimentary solution with very few features to a limited group of people. Back then, our first draft was a very simple tool which enabled companies to sign and store contracts digitally. We chose to focus narrowly on start-ups in order to gather information of their specific challenges and to get a better hold of our product so we could tailor a solution to their specific needs.
To put it academically, we decided to work vertically instead of horizontally.
Instead of winning 10,000 customers in the first two months, not knowing the pro’s and con’s of our solution, we worked towards getting 200 satisfied customers and receive the complete impression of the qualities as well as limits of our solution in return.
Lifting the burden of startups
Soon, our customers felt listened to and their feedback actually helped us create real solutions to real problems. This strategy, popularly called the Lean-strategy, has been our way to customer loyalty.
We quickly learned that startups often neglect complicated legal work since they are not able to pay for expensive lawyers. By implementing easy templates with Bird & Bird (see them here), we learned that we were able to lift a huge burden for those startups.
The limit to our product was a lack of flexibility. So we decided to offer tailor-made features for the companies who were ready to commit to Contractbook. This way, they became happier with our solution, and we developed a much deeper product with some features we had not thought of ourselves. By giving value to their feedback, we made them strong advocates for Contractbook, as they learned to see the true worth of us.
Today, we aim to help our like-minded friends in the community and grow big with the Danish startups as loyal long-term customers.
We are nowhere near the before mentioned piña colada galore but we have a basketball hoop in our office and our way to the top is solid and secure. You can follow what we do on our blog.
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