Introducing ithinki
Our story began, as for many companies, with my co-founder and I building a totally different product. We were first-time founders working on an on-demand marketplace app; which, in case you were wondering, is one of the hardest apps to get to market with.
As we were preparing to launch, we were looking for ways to gather feedback from our users, you know, the usual stuff; what’s working, what’s not, what you hate, what you find mildly annoying, and what features you would most like to see.
What we found available was a small selection of products that were missing big features. They were outrageously expensive pricing models and that price grew exponentially while still being quite average quality… enter ithinki.
Initial alternative
At first, we decided to go with Trello, it wasn’t ideal but we could kind of make it work. There were some pretty key elements of the UI that we had issues with, and we could only get one add-on with the free tier so had to make pretty brutal choices when it came to functionality. For example, neither sorting or voting come out of the box. Our solution was to use a sorting add-on and add comments with a ‘+1’ in place of voting. This was most definitely not ideal.
The pivot
We had reached a point with our marketplace app where we had come to the conclusion that we couldn’t find a pricing model that people would pay for and we were probably not best placed to launch the app if we were to switch to a different demographic to market to. We started discussing what we felt we were missing most when trying to launch our marketplace app and it was this feedback tool that we kept coming back to so started discussing it in more detail. The more we looked for a solution the more we saw an opportunity in this space.
Assessing the likelihood of success
One of the most common pieces of startup advice is “build something you want and then you’ll have at least one user”… check. At the absolute minimum with this product, we could then be sure we’d have a tool that fits our needs for future startups. We could also see a number of products who have a decent-sized user base and seemingly active users. We had a couple of issues with those; their features were limited, the biggest being lack of ability to post feedback anonymously, and we also couldn’t afford any of them, hence a gap in the market.
Unique selling points
The more we discussed ithinki (it now had a name), the more we liked the idea!
The biggest functionality we have been able to add from the get-go is advanced customization. We allow our customers to create a board that to a user would look like you are still on their website with logo’s, background images, and colour schemes. This is becoming ever more important with customers focusing on consistent branding.
Another USP we offer is providing companies with fully interactive public boards, allowing users to stay anonymous. Our competitors all require the end-user to create an account to provide feedback or comment/vote on existing feedback. We offer fully public boards with the ability to post feedback as an anonymous user from day one.
We also offer a simple, fair, predictable pricing model, based on the number of team members rather than the amount of traffic to the boards. We ensure that our customers are paying for additional functionality as opposed to the volume of use. Additionally, our free tier provides a fully functional product where we restrict very little, meaning companies can see the value as quickly as possible!
Our long term goal is to provide a seamless experience for our customers where they can use the tool internally to manage their workflows, and provide their end users with transparent information about what they’re working on.
For us
What we find particularly exciting is that we now have this tool at our disposal and that we can be totally interactive with our own users. It gives us a chance to show how quickly we respond to feedback and make sure what we’re doing is in line with what our users want. We now have an opportunity to make this feedback flow two ways, and can capitalize on being able to communicate back and forth with our users to make sure we’re solving their underlying problems.
tl;dr
ithinki is a feedback tool, bridging the gap between companies and their users. Our goal is to empower companies to get the right product to market faster. We’re really excited about ithinki, and we’re excited to work closely with all our users, we hope everyone is excited to work with us too!
