startup journey: Day-1
Is this idea worth exploring ?
First off: I am a great fan of Slack. Setting up team chat rooms drastically reduced the number of emails we send to each other.
This is the first time in my digital life I can safely say that my prime communication channel is not email.
Today I check my email about two times per day primarily for external communication.
the Pain
In the last 3 years I have used numerous tools to increase conversions and improve the relation with our clients. The one thing that really bothered me is the crappy livechat solutions.
Currently there are some players (olark, snapengage, zopim, …) that have nailed the (visitor) interface and the process around the chat. But no one has thought about the agent/team experience. Plus the mobile experience is horrible!
the Big Idea
A recent post on the Slack blog (announcing the API) led me to think i could solve the above by connecting live chat with slack.
The idea: Livechat for your visitors, Slack for your staff.
Has anyone tried this ? I decided to go through product hunt to discover slack related products. An interesting comment in the Slack Chats hunt said (shortened):
Here’s a few things I’d try to build as Fantasy-PM of Slack:
1. Kill more email. Right now it solves ‘intra’, but where’s ‘inter’?
2. Public channels:….
3. Eliminate the “contact us”/helpdesk abyss
Source: Comment by @ShaanVP on ProductHunt.
This convinced me that i was on to something, worth spending a little more time on.
Software for myself
After reading a pile of self-improvement/startup books I convinced myself that the next time I start a business it needs to solve a problem I face every day. That way I’ll be the target audience and know what is important giving me a great head start.
Don’t get me wrong: I will not start this business just because I think it’s a great idea. Before I continue I need to be sure that this is a problem worth solving. More on that below.
Build less
The idea for LiveSlack to become successful is under-do the competition. There are plenty of LiveChat services out there. I lost count after the first 20. I guess olark, snapengage and Zopim are the most famous ones.
So what will we do ? Build less. Solve a simple problem and leave the nasty/difficult problems to everyone else. Less features, less options and less promises.
Validate
A lot has been said about how to validate your idea. Surveying, Landing pages and MVP’s, all methods that will take at least a few hours to set-up.
To avoid spending my time on a lousy or useless idea I want to make sure this is solving a real problem. Therefore I need to easy way to validate the idea. Let’s start by trying to answer a good list of “winning idea” questions:
- What problem is being solved? Chatting with your visitors sucks for support/customer satisfaction teams.
- Who, specifically, would pay money to have this problem solved? Every company that loves Slack and wants to improve the relation with their clients or prospects.
- How urgent a problem is it for those people? Hard one. The product needs to be a painkiller and not a vitamin. Answering the question I do think it is not that urgent. Most of them already have a process in place.
- Who else solves this problem, or similar problems? There is a big list of competitors that already have a live chat service with their own agent or portal. If any of those competitors notices the opportunity they can probably squash us. Red light ?
- Why would somebody choose this solution over the alternatives of what they use currently? Your entire team can offer live chat to your prospects and clients without installing a piece of software. Chatting with prospects and visitors would become a team activity.
- Where are those people located and how can they be accessed? This is the easy part: 1) Every site that uses or has mentioned a live chat service and uses slack and 2) Every slack company that is looking to increase conversion/customer relations through live chat.
Answering those questions kinda put things in to perspective. I am worried about 3) and 4).
Do your feet hurt ?
The first thing I will do now is “get out the building” and start talking with potential customers. I will ask them “do your feet hurt?” If they don’t start complaining for the next 10 minutes they don’t have a pain point and it might make sense to give up this venture.
Additionally I will ask these questions:
- How do they solve the problem now ?
- How much does this cost you right now ? And how much would they pay to solve this problem ?
- Do you know somebody that has the same problem ?
Starting from right now I will contact everyone that wants to speak to me on this idea. To be continued.
All posts are listed in “Startup Journey” publication.
