Ask Inline — Being data driven is hard, we’d like to help
Ask any bootstrapping startup what they should have done earlier and nearly all of them will say that they should have started talking publicly about what they were building earlier. No matter when they actually started, they should have done it earlier.
Blogged about the launch? Should have blogged about the impending launch.
Blogged about the impending launch? Should have blogged about the months of writing code that preceded it.
Blogged about the code? Should have blogged when it was just an idea floating through your head.
Whoops
So uh… this thing I’ve been working on for a few months called Ask Inline, it’s about to launch.
Who we have been talking to
Product people
We waited a little long to publicly talk about what we’re building. Fortunately, we didn’t wait to talk to our potential customers. Over the course of the last four months, I’ve had ongoing conversations with over thirty different product people at companies ranging in size from pre-revenue to billions in market cap.
Feedback is hard, let us help
Of the product people that I’ve talked to, just above half of them use a software tool to gather feedback from customers. Some of those tools are email based, some are community forums, others are in-app such as Intercom. Most of these tools are geared toward 1:1 support, feedback or conversations. Teams that don’t use a tool are most commonly dependent on another part of the organization such as support, customer success or sales teams to receive customer feedback.
Here’s the problem we’re going to solve: Of the teams that use a tool to gather feedback, 100% of the people that I’ve talked talk to expressed dissatisfaction with the effort required to derive actionable insights from their data.
I want to be the very best!
Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone has a plan until they get hit.” Similarly, everyone in product land wants to be data driven until they have to weed through the data.
What’s the takeaway from reading customer feedback one at a time? “Okay, I just add these 120 new features each of which is wanted by a single person and my product will be great.”
No one actually draws that conclusion. Instead, we should look at what the customer base is telling us holistically. Support or customer success can focus on helping individuals while product teams should attempt to stay focused on the forest instead of the trees. Unfortunately, triaging data to see the holistic picture takes hours each week with customers outnumbering product managers thousands to one and it’s not something that can be done once. It’s ongoing, tedious work. Important, but tedious.
Automation is coming
Marketing automation started slowly with web adverts and email marketing but in recent years has taken on new life as platforms that act as hubs service multiple spokes (advertising, email, mobile and content marketing).
Similarly, at Ask Inline we believe that feedback collection and deriving actionable insights from that data can be automated.
Where We’re At
As with most young companies we’re starting simple. We’re developing a great product with a single focus with the goal of expanding the offering over time to enable a wider range of feedback collection and insight automation.
Automated In-App NPS Surveys
We’ll be talking more about `why in-app NPS surveys` over the coming weeks, for now I’ll summarize with the following:
Tens of thousands of businesses utilize NPS as a measure of customer sentiment about their brands, products and in-store experiences. A significant number of the SaaS companies that I’ve spoken to over the past four months track NPS as a core company metric. We, along with our alpha program members, believe NPS to be a reasonable place that Ask Inline can bring value.
We’ve also been lucky enough to get a closer look at experiments run by several different companies comparing email based NPS surveys and in-app surveys. While we can’t share those numbers publicly, the results are extremely compelling. We may offer an optional email based collection option in the future but we’re starting with in-app because we’re convinced that it’s a great fit for most teams.
Automated Feedback Triage
One of the benefits of doing in-app surveys is the increase in user participation. Said simply: in-app surveys get more responses and therefore more data. The downside of this is that more data means more data to comb through in order to get a holistic picture (a view of the forest).
That’s why we’ve built bucketing of feedback items into the data dashboard. The second question of an NPS survey is an open-ended question where customers can share their thoughts. As these survey responses come into the system, they can be automatically categorized by the topic. This allows you to track how widespread a complaint or feature request is.
Have a look at example bucketing reports:
Alpha to Beta
We’re excited about the journey ahead of us and we’re hoping a few of you will join in. Our alpha program members are happy with where the product has landed so we’re shifting from alpha to beta at this time. We expect this beta period to be short lasting no more than one month. After that we’ll open up sign ups and self-service onboarding will be available.
The reason for the beta program is simple. Everyone who has been in product land for a while knows that “built it and they will come” is simply not a thing. So we’ve built it, but we’re still in the stage where every new customer requires a 1:1 relationship to develop the critical trust that’s required for someone to fold a new product into their team’s workflow.
This relationship is two way:
Our earliest customers have paid for a SaaS product but get advice and service that would normally be more expensive. For example, we’re manually sending weekly ‘feedback roundup’ emails to several customers, something we hope to automate soon. Lots of “do things that done scale” if you will.
On the other side, we get candid feedback and insight into how Ask Inline is or is not working for these early customers. Product market fit isn’t easy so this feedback is invaluable for learning how to hit the high notes.
Because of this two-way street, we wanted to formalize the relationship and give some guarantees and pricing incentives to the amazing teams that are helping us out so early in our journey.
We believe that data driven teams create better products and have happier customers. Being data driven is hard, we’d like to help. If you’re interested in joining the beta, head over to askinline.com.
Cheers,
Wesley Walser
