How We Launched HelpHandles on the Same Day Twitter Made Customer Service Even Better
Around May last year, I came up with the idea for my latest WordPress theme. It would be a content marketing theme for startup Founders to share their story, build an email list and sell digital products. It took a couple of months to complete and I submitted it to ThemeForest with confidence in its originality.
After a few revisions, Founder was approved for sale and quickly became my fastest selling theme to date.
The extra money was great, but I had been suffering WordPress fatigue. Founder was my sixth theme and the late nights sat at my computer designing and coding, trawling the WordPress codex and Stack Overflow was taking its toll. I decided to take a break from the WordPress conveyor belt and refocus my efforts on a non-WordPress related project — without actually knowing what that non-WordPress related project would be.
Birthdays, Barry & Bouncy Castle’s
It was summer 2015. We decided to rent a bouncy castle for Eva’s 3rd birthday party. My wife made the arrangements and on the morning of Saturday 13th June, Barry turned up with his wife and our bouncy castle. I recognized Barry immediately. We used to go to school together, and we were in the same Business Studies A-Level class, I hadn’t seen him for over 20 years.
After a brief catch-up, it transpired that Barry was a bit of a domain name entrepreneur — he was responsible for inventing Domain Name Parking in the UK, which resulted in his company being acquired by 123-REG / Webfusion Ltd in 2008, one of the largest hosting companies in Europe.
Over the next few weeks, I went domain name crazy. On the hunt for new interesting project ideas, I registered HappyDrivers.co and setup a landing page for one page websites for driving instructors. Within a few more weeks I’d registered HappyTrades.co one page websites for tradesmen and sent out emails to all my ex-trades clients and contacts.
It was summer (June 2015), our second child was due in November and we had just exchanged on a new off plan house, ready to move in November. I was starting to get twitchy.
Fast forward to early September, I turned 39 and whilst sitting at my desk one afternoon thinking about where my next idea would come from, I had a brief moment of clarity. I sent my Dad a text message.
Weds 9th Sept 2015 — 14.56
I have a new idea.
It’s very early stage — all those people who complain/moan on Twitter — what if there was a website that aggregated all those complaints and assigned them to companies…
Like me…Sounds good. How does it work… — Dad
I hit Domainr. Started randomly typing in (terrible) domain names.
letoffsomesteam.com — Moan.io — Moan.ly
Within the next few days my initial idea had moved on to building a micro service that would help people find a companies Twitter support account, raise a complaint or thank you and rate the experience against others.
Do you know what a Twitter Handle is?
No. Enlighten me — Dad
I hit Domainr again and typed in helphandles.com — it was available.
Mikhail, Moscow & Mockups
I fired up Google and started searching for freelancer websites and came across Upwork. I posted a very simple job and within minutes I had a list of freelancers vying to get started on the project. After chatting with a few, I came across a very confident, and direct guy from Moscow who said he could do the work.
It felt right, so I hired him.
Working with Mikhail was great. He was easy to communicate with, patient, and understood quickly what I was trying to achieve. He also worked fast. Within 2 weeks, Mikhail coded the application and I spent a few hours in the evening coding up the front-end in and mocking up a simple logo. I had a prototype ready to go. Mikhail deployed the application on Heroku and we were live.
I worked the Twitter machine. Hard. I quickly setup a new account for HelpHandles and added all the branded help handle accounts I could find to a Twitter list. I started to follow these accounts and listened into the thousands of real-time conversations going backwards and forwards between customers and brands. It was fascinating. Before long, I started to drop in on conversations. I started to ask if people would be interested to vote or provide feedback on HelpHandles.com
After a few days, people started to visit the site and vote. Some even took the time to write a review. It was a great feeling to see people engaging with the site and doing it so passionately. I decided to follow up with some of these people and find out more about their motivations and why they had voted and left reviews. I also contacted some friends who worked in the internet industry and got their feedback on the idea, it seemed that everyone had something positive to say about HelpHandles. I started to collect all the feedback and quickly put together some very early mockups using a neat free tool called moqups.com
It wasn't long before I started to notice a trend, some company help handles were starting to rise up the ranks on the site, and one in particular was gaining a lot of upvotes and positive reviews. That account was LinkedInHelp. One afternoon, someone left a really positive review for LinkedInHelp on the site, so I tweeted it out to my followers. Before I knew it, the tweet started to get retweeted. I think it amassed something like 20 retweets before I received a tweet from Derek Homann, Head of Social Customer Support at LinkedIn, thanking me.
Derek said he liked the site so far and seemed really interested, so I asked if he would be happy to give me some feedback. Before I knew it a DM landed in my inbox with Derek’s contact address at LinkedIn. I followed up quickly and after we exchanged a few emails introducing ourselves, Derek asked me if I would like to join a call with him to chat more on the subject.
I accepted with a little trepidation, apart from speaking with the Head of Social Customer Support for LinkedIn, I’d surprisingly not done much online conferencing before. A week later, a day before we moved house, sat amongst the packed up boxes in our bedroom, my face was beamed into Derek's office in Omaha NE, via Skype.
Derek was great. He was knowledgeable, open and happily shared some ideas around social customer service, tools, metrics and brands, and I shared some of my ideas around how I was planning to build tools to encourage users to post reviews on the site. I discussed with him some other possibilities of where I could take HelpHandles, he happily offered his thoughts and suggestions. I decided to share some of the early mockups I had created, and it was his reaction to these that really encouraged me. He really felt that I should be offering tools to help brands and that there was potential for HelpHandles to become a complimentary service to some of the larger enterprise level social listening and media management tools on the market.
I thought this was interesting, and so I got to work immediately researching and adding in performance metrics to the mockups I had created. I also noticed how LinkedIn encouraged premium signups to their Job Seeker accounts. The ‘See How You Compare to the Competition’ really inspired me, and I decided to replicate this model for the HelpHandles site. I created a feature that would allow brands to access and track other brands metrics to compare their performance, subsequently creating two-levels of access. A Basic and Premium account.
I sent the revised mock-ups to Derek, who replied enthusiastically stating he loved it, would like to introduce me to some others in the industry and that I really needed to build a MVP and get it out there for more feedback.
On Friday 30th October 2015 we moved into our new home, and Ivy was born the same weekend at 6pm on Sunday 1st November 2015. I took a couple of weeks off work on paternity leave and took a step back from HelpHandles.
We were now fast approaching Christmas. Not a great time to be building products in your bedroom, but nonetheless, I’d had a couple of weeks downtime to reflect on HelpHandles, and felt that the feedback I had attracted so far was encouraging, I also felt it had gained enough momentum for me to take it to the next stage.
My Founder theme was continuing to sell on ThemeForest and had generated enough cash for me to manage a small budget and plan out more development work. I contacted Mikhail and started to plan out each feature into milestones and sprints, ready for Mikhail to allocate development time and costs. We agreed that Mikhail would focus on developing the back-end application and logic and I would design the front-end templates. I spent the next few weeks tweaking the feature set, prioritizing and de-prioritizing on what would and wouldn't make it into the beta version of HelpHandles.
New Year, Beta Invites & Twitter
Development was fully underway, we collaborated using BitBucket and Trello and I learned a ton of new stuff about Git, Heroku and working with different coding languages. I decided to put a simple MailChimp signup form on the prototype website to encourage users to request early access to the beta site.
Over the Xmas period, I actively promoted early access to the beta on Twitter, and by the New Year, I had 20 or so signups for site, nothing amazing but interestingly about half of those signups were Social Customer Care Managers and Thought Leaders within the industry.
It was now early January and we still needed to deliver the final milestone. I was starting to get anxious as I wanted to be able to ship the beta and get some feedback as soon as possible. After a few late nights Mikhail delivered the final milestone, we spent some time testing and making final design adjustments to the templates and finally we had something ready for beta testing.
I quickly mocked up a screenshot of the brand pages and uploaded it to MailChimp. I setup a simple mail template with some instructions, a link to the beta site and an open invitation to reach out with contact details and sent it to my subscriber list.
Next, I logged into Twitter and crafted a very simple Tweet.
Within a few minutes, I noticed the open rate start to rise and was confident the message had landed. Within a few more minutes, I noticed a few new users had subscribed to the beta list. I logged into MailChimp and noticed one of the email addresses. It was from Twitter.
I paused for a moment and quickly sent another mailer. Almost immediately, I received the following reply.
Hi Dean
Thanks for access to the beta!
I work at Twitter on our Platform Partnerships team and am interested in learning more about what you're building. It looks really interesting and well aligned with some of our initiatives around customer care.
Would you be up for a call/demo to talk to us about what you're building? We’re always on the look out for new and innovative things happening in the Twitter ecosystem — and from the looks of it, you have something we haven't seen before.
Let me know if you're up for a call and we can find a UK/US friendly time.
Thanks
I got up from my seat and went outside and stared at my phone for a few minutes. I re-read the message a few times and replied.
Hi,
No problem! Thanks for your email.
Sure happy to take you through a demo, i’m available this week from Thursday on wards or any day next week.
After 8PM evenings UK GMT time is good for me.
Let me know and we can set something up.
Thanks.
The invite came that evening for a Google Hangout for myself and three others on the product team at Twitter. Next day, I started to do some research online, looked up each person on the invite list and headed to the Twitter Partners website.
My imagination started to run away with me.
What were they working on?
Are they interested in working with me?
How does this partnership thing work?
Did they want to invest in HelpHandles?
Maybe they want to acquire HelpHandles?
It was a long 14 days. I prepared. I read up on how to present a good demo. I did more research, I listened to social customer care podcasts, and put together a little pitch. Meanwhile, I started to receive some feedback from the beta, I also had some key areas I wanted to improve before releasing, so I put together a final list of beta features and asked Mikhail to work on it.
The Twitter Demo
Demo day came — the call was scheduled for 9pm GMT time, and I was nervous. I drove back from work in London and arrived at the house around 7pm — enough time to play with the kids, and get organised for the call.
Around 8.30pm my wife packed the kids up in the car and took them for a drive leaving me with some uninterrupted time for the call.
I waited for everyone to join the call, and introduced myself. I was nervous, and suffering from a bad case of impostor syndrome. I talked a little about my background and how I had come about to founding HelpHandles. I then moved onto the demo and showcased the key benefits, and features of the site whilst highlighting some areas that needed improvement and pitched some of my ideas.
I finished the demo, switched screens back to the meeting, and noticed that one of the attendees had left. Soon another had to drop off the call and the meeting ended with me reaching out for some concrete actions or follow up points, but I was given no promises. It wasn’t the position I wanted to be in.
The following days left me feeling discouraged that the meeting hadn't gone to plan. I spent too long internalizing over the details and painfully, picked it apart.
Had I come across as difficult?
Was I someone they didn't want to work with?
Did they want to steal my idea?
Had I fucked this whole thing up before it even got off the ground?
I needed to refocus on shipping HelpHandles.
The beta had finished, and I realised that I needed to keep momentum, I was busy as hell at work, but managed to pull together a somewhat rushed MailChimp campaign offering beta users a free trial. I thought this would give me the time to plan out a monetisation strategy and any necessary development time. My confidence had taken a beating, I was licking my wounds, but I was determined to ship HelpHandles.
The following week, we shipped HelpHandles.com and about an hour later, Twitter announced how they were making customer service even better.
To be continued….
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