Empower your team to collaborate better, smarter and faster with BoostHQ

BoostHQ is an interactive content hub that allows your team to share, collaborate and drive action on content from anywhere. With BoostHQ, content is organized into topic specific channels and can be shared from all the sources you already use (Dropbox, YouTube, Google Docs, etc). Feedback and analytics on shared content let you know what your team finds useful. Extract the expertise from everyone in your team and create a hub of information that moves work forward. Best of all, BoostHQ can be accessed on any device, from anywhere!

Kevin William David interviewed Sepand Barkhodaee, Chief Product Officer at BoostHQ to know more.

Hi Sepand, Can you tell us about what you are working on?

In 2013, we launched our first product, SkyPrep, an easy-to-use learning management system (LMS) that has since helped hundreds of companies automate their training processes. After being in the eLearning industry for four years and dealing with hundreds of clients, we realized that the majority of learning and collaboration actually happens informally — up to 80%, according to studies. Instead of just focusing on the formal aspect of training, we decided we wanted to build a module within SkyPrep that compliments how employees actually work and collaborate.

We then realized it made more sense for this new module to actually be its own standalone product, and so BoostHQ was born. BoostHQ is a workplace that brings teams together to get work done faster and more efficiently. Our product compliments the way teams already work, so team members can share links and resources, collaborate on documents, have discussions and finish projects efficiently. Everything is tagged and organized and it tightly integrates with your chrome browser and google docs, so teams can seamlessly share links and work on docs without breaking their workflow.

Tell me more about the problem you are trying to solve?

We are trying to capture all of the useful content teams use, and make it accessible on-demand. No more endless scrolling through chats and emails to find useful links. No more forgetting where your documents are. We are building a workspace where teams can search, find and work on everything they need seamlessly.

We feel we have built a product that actually works the way teams work. For example, when a team is tasked with creating a great email marketing campaign, each team member does most or all of these things:

• finding resources by Googling
• asking each other questions
• watching YouTube videos
• working on Google Docs
• chatting and sharing files through email or chat
• scheduling meetings
• tracking tasks
• getting feedback from each other on the tasks they finish

With BoostHQ, we’re aiming to building a workspace that complements and improves these experiences. It houses all of the work and content that matters to teams in a way that compliments their existing workflow.

When a marketer finds an article about the best campaigns of 2016, they can share it with the team directly from their browser. Copy-writers can can collaborate on their email template document. A designer can upload their first iteration of the email template layout and get feedback from teammates.

How is BoostHQ different from what’s already exists in the market?

BoostHQ is a content-first platform that integrates with what teams already use. Other tools like Slack, and Gmail are great for messaging, but a lot of your valuable content gets lost in chat and email threads. Everything revolves around the content in BoostHQ, and attached action-items drive even more value.

BoostHQ targets collaboration, productivity, and better teamwork in a professional setting. It helps make every employee better at their job through gaining expertise from everyone else they work with. This not only increases productivity, but employee morale as well.

Some other competitors are Quip, Asana and Trello since they are project management and task management tools.

Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using BoostHQ?

We are targeting teams that are between 5–25 people in SMBs. Since launching at the beginning of 2017, we’ve gotten 50+ companies on board in a variety of different verticals, and are finding the most amount of traction from design and marketing agencies, as well as software companies (and they have a design and marketing agencies).

The customer who finds BoostHQ and has championed our product into their company is usually the lead of a team — e.g. CEO of a smaller company, a product lead, a head of marketing that sort of thing.

How are your customers using BoostHQ? Could you share a few different use cases?

Because our Browser Share Extension is so easy to use, lots of our customers use BoostHQ as a means of curating their own libraries of valuable links from the net — so we see a lot of Medium articles and How-To videos being shared and discussed in their platforms. It basically turns into a knowledge repository for the team where team members are learning from each other.

Another common use case we see is marketing teams sourcing links and videos for research and inspiration, and then actually collaborating through docs on the work they are producing. They track the tasks they have and keep all of their content organized in their various workspaces to produce better work, faster.

Have there been unique use cases for BoostHQ that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

Well, our own product team (devs and designer) uses BoostHQ to build our product, but it’s been awesome to see how similarly many of our customers are using BoostHQ to help build their own products! Product leads create workspaces for the various projects and track deliverables, designers share and get feedback on their designs, developers communicate their concerns and difficulties, and marketers and other team members share links and examples of features in other apps they like.

Everybody responsible for product (which for a software company is basically everybody), contributes to building the product in their own way — all while providing feedback and insight. Our internal design, engineering and marketing teams are all on the same page when we use BoostHQ, and it looks like a significant portion of our customers are using it for their teams to collaborate the same way!

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

Quora and Product Hunt have been invaluable. We went through the startup phase with both SkyPrep and BoostHQ, and we have gone through many of the challenges and difficulties that others are currently going through. Taking the time to answer tons of questions and providing genuine answers to people has slowly-but-surely made us a trustworthy source of information. And to build on that, extending our expertise into blogging has also been successful, as our contributions relate to productivity and collaboration. We regularly contribute as guest bloggers on various industry pages and that continues to build our position as an industry leader.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

Building our product wasn’t as big a challenge as finding the right positioning and messaging for BoostHQ — that was something we wrestled with for some time. We are an early-to-market product and there aren’t many competitors that do exactly what our platform does, so it was difficult to concisely explain how our product works to customers. We needed to find some champions who were early-adopter types, who had felt the pains of team collaboration and had tried different tools to various degrees of success, and were looking for a different better way of solving the problem.

Once we found a handful of them, and had some concrete use-case, it became much easier to speak the language of our customers.

The biggest challenge while building BoostHQ early on was finding our place in the market. We really wanted to solve the problems of informal learning and collaboration in the workplace, but our solution was a new concept to many organizations. The most difficult challenge was having to decipher who the new potential adopters were, specifically the people who knew they had this problem in their organization, and segmenting ourselves in a way that would be attractive to them.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?

The most interesting and helpful integration we’ve added has been our Google Drive integration. Google Drive plays a huge role in many organizations’ day-to-day work, so we wanted to integrate this into our product. We to allow users to create and upload new Google Docs and Spreadsheets and embed them directly into BoostHQ workspaces. We also take care of permissions so Docs and Spreadsheets are available to team members, and overlay our comments and chat on top of that. We’ve basically added a layer of functionality and ease of use to Google Docs and our customers love it!

Finally, What are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

GetClicky: to view our website traffic sources — easy to navigate and lets us know where our backlinks are coming from

BitBucket: Git for our dev team. Easy to use — everything you’d expect. Plus, nice that it’s free for smaller teams.

Google Docs: creating and collaborating on documents — Docs is easy to use and works on multiple platforms. Integrates with our product too, so we love its seamless content editing

SEMRush: for organic backlinks, analytics, keywords. Easy for our marketing team to do market research and helps us with our positioning.

Intercom: to communicate with our customers so they can ask for questions or get feedback. Can be a bit frustrating to use at times, but a good way for us to set up email marketing campaigns as well as get product feedback.