Wantoo Success Story
First Mars, then Managing Feedback: How an Innovation Lab is Iterating a Popular Product
Axiom Zen is an innovation lab whose products and software have been used all over the world… and beyond. While you may have gotten addicted to the company’s sugar-skull puzzle game on your phone, Axiom Zen’s ZenHub project management software helps NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory put robots on Mars more efficiently. As marketing lead Alec Morgana puts it, “We’re a startup that builds startups.” One of the startups is Toby, a Chrome extension that helps you manage all those tabs in a sane way.
Toby emerged as many great ideas do: from a conversation. Arthur Camara, creator of Toby, says he envisioned a product for “people who suffer from browser-tab overload… or browser-tab hoarding!” Adds Morgana with a laugh, “Arthur kind of went nuts and built Toby into what it is at this point.”
An early-stage product at the moment, Toby has found its way into the browsers and hearts of marketing directors, engineers, data scientists, and more. “The overall vision is personal information management,” says Camara.
Start as You Mean to Go On
As with all living things, early days of a product are very important. The Toby team wanted to improve retention among its early users, who now number nearly 30,000. “The app exploded, and the support inbox has been flooded with feature requests and bug reports.” Morgana says. “We wanted one hub for all of that stuff to live. We were looking for exactly what Wantoo is: a simple tool where things can be gathered and voted on. It was kind of a no-brainer, just exactly what we were looking for.”
“Too much complexity intimidates users,” adds Camara. “In our case, we were just starting, and we wanted the feedback process to be as simple as possible. We get feature requests from all over the place! Twitter, email, the Google Chrome app store… we wanted to find a solution for making sense of all that.”
The Toby app already had a “send feedback” link, which pointed to a dedicated email address. The team had created a spreadsheet to organize requests for de-duplicating the ideas pouring in. That, says Camara, was a bit of a bottleneck: “Our intern Benny was manually updating it and trying to estimate the prioritizing of things.” It was confusing and labor-intensive: Benny is a valued member of the team, after all, and should not be subjected to headaches. “Now,” says Camara, “he can easily shoot the user a link to Wantoo.”
Curing the Common Headache
Axiom Zen has a team of 70 people, working from offices in Vancouver, San Francisco, and Santiago de Chile. The Toby team is three or four. “We really just wanted something super-simple,” says Morgana. “So far it’s really intuitive and doing exactly what we wanted it to. We’re getting this list of prioritized features. Before we had that Excel spreadsheet, and now we have a very clear list, prioritized by our users, of what we should build next.”
The Toby team’s enthusiasm was sparked by Wantoo’s “Listen, analyze and act” methodology, but that’s not all. Morgana says, “Looks were important.” Perhaps it was our pink logo, similar in tone to Toby’s:
Camara really liked how easy it was to get that pink to match exactly: “The simple list, the ability to add our own branding, the ability to customize the question — it still feels like part of our product.”
Camara spent less than five minutes to set up Toby’s Wantoo Board, and Benny quickly added the ideas that were already on the team’s radar. They shared the board via email, plugging it into their existing support workflow. Morgana adds, “The overall simplicity of it was the most surprising thing.”
Toby is making new friends wherever it goes. As their user base grows, the small-but-agile Toby team is equipped to build with confidence. “We’re using Wantoo for insights,” says Morgana, “and for getting a general idea of where people want Toby to move.”
About Wantoo
Wantoo is a simple, powerful cloud-based platform that makes it easy to listen, analyze, and act on feedback from your team, your customers, or anyone else. For more information, visit wantoo.io.
