A free tool for lean startup
In his New York Times bestseller “The Lean Startup,” Eric Ries describes his method of entrepreneurship and how to create a successful startup. The method he presents is focused on building a minimal part of your product idea, which you then give to customers to get feedback and learn from. By doing so, you can avoid a typical startup pitfall: Startups often begin with an idea for a product that they think people want. They then spend months or years perfecting that product without ever showing it to the prospective customer. When they fail to reach broad uptake, it is often because they never spoke to prospective customers and determined whether or not their product idea was interesting.
The better approach is to build something simple and get feedback from customers fast. This is what Eric Ries calls the Build-Measure-Learn principle. It stems partly from his own experiences with IMVU.com, where his team developed a rough (but not complete) version of an instant messaging + 3D avatars product and released it full of bugs (worrying all the while about how customers would react to all the bugs). But after the launch, there were no customer reactions. They didn’t get the thousands of downloads they expected, and they didn’t know why. Their solution was to go into direct dialogue with the customers who were using the product — to understand what customers thought of it and how they could pivot the product to make it more attractive for the users. After that, it became a huge success.
Our tool to learn from customers
I have been very inspired by the lean startup methodology, and since we are working with SaaS products, it is extremely important for us to get input directly from customers in the context they are using the product. Therefore, we developed a product just for that, which we call Concierge. Let’s give a couple of thought examples:
The movie app
Imagine you have developed a movie app that shows film ratings and lets you connect to other friends to see their own scores for the movies. As a good lean startup enthusiast, you develop a minimal viable product and put it out to customers. You get a couple of downloads. But you do not know exactly what features you should develop next in order to attract new customers, keep your current customers and make them promoters for the product.
We developed Concierge so you can easily talk to customers. You basically drop a couple lines of code in the app, and you then have a direct communication channel. See the screen comparison below, where the feedback options were added on the right:
As you can see, you can both chat and talk directly with the customer. From your point of view, it would look something like this if a customer reached out to you:
On the left is an inbox, where you can pick up calls and talk directly with the customer. Here you can get valuable feedback. Maybe customers would like to click a “I want to watch this movie” button and have the app match them with friends who are also interested. Explaining this with just words can sometimes be very difficult for customers. It is often easier if you can actually see what is happening on the customer’s mobile device. So we added the option to remotely view the customer’s screen and draw on it. See below:
Here I am talking directly to the customer. We let you turn on the camera to make a more personal connection … but you do not have to do this.
Concierge is a great tool if you would like to get feedback for your mobile app. You actually only have to add the following code to your mobile project:
The travel startup
Most companies don’t start with an app (even though that is increasingly the case), but almost all companies have a website. Our next thought example is a small startup selling travel packages.
On the left you see a Danish travel agency called “Victor’s Grandma.” A trip to Ecuador costs around 6000 dollars from Denmark, so if a customer is unsure in any way, the small startup would like to know exactly what the customer is thinking and where their uncertainty is. By adding a very simple snippet of Concierge code to your website, you can place a button on your page that gives you the opportunity to talk directly with customers. That way, you can make sure they buy your travel package.
Again, getting in direct contact with your customers is very easy — just add the following lines to your HTML code:
It’s free
The technologies in Concierge are new for us in GoToAssist. With new technologies, we really want to learn first and try to make money later. So, we have decided to give the product away free to the first 500 customers — in the hope that they will provide feedback. The basic functionality, like website chat, website audio (you can also talk to the customer) and screen sharing, is free for everyone. But we believe that some big customers will love the product so much that they will ask for integrations or other features, and at that point we will ask for payment. For most startups, Concierge covers everything they need. In the free plan you’ll be able to host up to 1000 monthly customer sessions. If you have more than that number a month, you can always upgrade to a paid plan. But we haven’t met a startup yet that talks to more than 1000 customers every month. So for all intents and purposes, it’s free for startups.
How do I get started?
If you would like to read learn more or sign up, check out the GoToAssist website: https://www.gotoassist.com/remote-support/anytime/concierge
Good luck with your lean startup!
