Hacking Intercom to build a MVP (part 2)

What has happened until now?

Basil.chat was launched on Product hunt at midnight on 8th of October 2017. Since then we have a few updates to share with the everyone. The response from the design and product community has been overwhelming. We would like to thank everyone who has used the services of Basil.chat. As we mentioned in the last post, this was a side project completed over a weekend, there was minimal effort done to make active changes to the product due to our other time and work commitments. But due to the response we have received from the community, we have decided to continue development and make improvements to the product. Another post on that is coming soon, but first some stats on what happened in the last 78 days since.

Statistics

Stats since launch day until Christmas (not that fancy and mind blowing 😂)

206 people requesting feedback from 55 different countries

People requesting feedback from all over the world 😀

~3000 minutes spent writing and delivering feedback

Who has been requesting the services of Basil.chat?

1. Designers who are working solo, freelance, one person design teams, studying design, part of bigger design teams in companies.
2. Product people/founders who want to improve their products.
3. People who have businesses where they usually would not hire design professionals ex. Restaurants, Manufacturers
4. People who already have an app, logo, website, etc. but want to improve it further and might not have immediate support from design professionals.

What kind of questions are being asked for feedback?

What we were surprised by was the exhaustive nature of questions that came our way. Since the service was branded as “Design feedback via chat” we unintentionally left it wide open for questions from various disciplines of design. The most asked questions were the following:

Feedback on app design?

Feedback on landing page/website design?

Feedback on logos?

Feedback on dashboards/interface elements within an app?

Other kind of questions that came our way:

1. Feedback on restaurant menu cards
2. Packaging design feedback
3. Design portfolio reviews
4. How to improve design skills and where to get best knowledge from?
5. How to make design “fun” and “playful”?
6. Why is this service free?
7. Why are you doing this service?

What we learnt until now:

1. It’s important to focus on one thing and communicate it clearly.

We said “Design feedback” but did not really specify what kind of design and who should be contacting us. Thus we had all kinds of questions coming our way some of which we were not completely comfortable answering.

2. It is helpful to have some kind of a pricing model in mind.

It’s important to have some way of making money for the product you are building. It should not become a time and financial burden especially if it’s a side project.

3. Provide the service you are claiming to offer.

“Design feedback via chat” was our initial claim and we were not able to keep up with it. With “chat” people expected real time responses and due to time zone differences etc. we were not able to do that. Thus we change this claim in the next iteration of the product.

4. Continue making small improvements and iterations of the MVP.

We already had a lot of learnings and improvements ideas within the first few days of the service being live but couldn’t really work on it due to other time commitments. Find time to make small improvements to continue the initial momentum.