The case for building your own product

We built a product for ourselves — and we’re thrilled by the demand for it

Substantial is known for dreaming up products for clients, like the virtual workspace that connects teams across continents, or the digital adaptation of the card game where kittens explode. We’re also known by our clients for our philosophy of design and process: a clear vision supported by scalable long-term success strategies.

As we built out client products year after year — we’ve been at it for twelve now — our developers longed for a feature that would make their work a lot easier: Trello cards with the ability to group cards into larger pieces of work, like epics.

So we built the solution for ourselves: Hello Epics, a Trello Power-Up for identifiable links between cards. (And as it turns out, tech giants, farmers markets, and even school teachers needed the Power-Up too.)

Here’s how building an internal product reinforced our own principles of product development.

1 — Understand how the product fits the market

“We tried to solve this problem of tracking progress on a project over and over again. We needed it, and we knew there might be other people who needed it as well,” says Aaron, the developer who introduced the concept.

“People want to be able to manage more complicated workflows. They like the ease and simplicity of Trello, but they want the additional ability to track tasks at multiple levels of hierarchy.”

Identifying our own problem was a good start, but we needed to make sure that our solution would be useful to audiences beyond ourselves. Since the success of a product depends on how well it addresses a need in the market and competes against existing solutions, we asked ourselves questions we would ask our clients, like:

• Is there a workaround that already exists?
• Will this help people with workflows like ours? With workflows unlike ours?

Purposeful, inquisitive testing helped us find answers.

2 — Communicate with the target audience — test early and often

“We constantly talk to our customers. I often ask, what about this is working for you?” says Aaron. In early beta testing, “one customer compared Hello Epics to being on an oasis in the desert, and somebody comes up and hands you a drink of water.” It was really clear there was a need for this product.

Another layer of complexity we needed to resolve was building an intuitive integration for an existing brand. “That was one of the main tenets of our design politics — we wanted Hello Epics to feel like you’re using Trello,” Aaron says. “Early customers told us: this is exactly how I imagine Trello would have built this.”

First-hand feedback like this helped validate our solution. And beta testers who enjoyed using Hello Epics ultimately became customers.

In beta testing and after launch, we saw customers using the Power-Up to manage inventory and sales in farmers markets, track components of TV antennas, plan course curricula, and oversee product launches across numerous industries.

3 — Pick the right pricing model

Choosing a pricing model that’s right for your audience is key to profitability. Our team used the Van Westendorp pricing survey, which asks customers directly…

At what price is the product:

• a bargain?
• expensive, but still considerable?
• too expensive?
• so inexpensive that you’d start to question the quality?

We offered two different plans and revisited our strategy to change them to best support our users and sustainable growth.

4 — Readiness to launch

We’ve blogged about the pitfalls of launch avoidance: the fear-based wait to perfect a product before it goes to market. This can be costly. So we took our own advice and launched early, to ourselves and small groups.

We knew that customers would want the ability to spread parent-child relationships across boards, and made a conscious decision to launch without that feature. Focusing our energy on the MVP helped us prioritize and create scalable post-launch support.

Launching on time put us in a great position to stay on budget, iterate on feature expansion, and engage customers.

5 — Customer acquisition (and retention) is as important as we thought

Since Trello already existed, there was an existing audience to introduce the product to. A company’s existing base is its most powerful audience, and the better you treat them, the more likely your business is to succeed.

The strategy here is simple, yet sometimes overlooked: meaningful customer service. Our engagement manager Magda says, “Our users love our responsiveness. It’s amazing how often we’re complimented for our fast, painless communication.”

In the case of Hello Epics, having an existing audience helped us to beta test an internal product, and ultimately, convert customers.

Hello, Hello Epics

We built Hello Epics with a specific use case in mind: ours. And by following our own protocol, we built an internal product that increased revenue and solved other peoples’ problems, too. Trello customers like Petco, inVision, and Glassdoor are using Hello Epics to oversee and simplify complex projects.

And we reinforced some our own values:

• Evaluate how the product fits into the existing market
• Communicate directly with the target audience, testing early and often
• Choose a pricing model that’s right for your audience
• Don’t be overly precious about the launch state
• Good customer service builds a good business

Ready to create something big? Substantial has helped hundreds of clients build digital products with passion and precision. Find us at substantial.com or reach out directly at newbusiness@substantial.com.