Ask HN: Vet my idea

3 points by macguyver 11 years ago | 6 comments

Dear HN community, let me know your thoughts. If you are a founder or know someone who's having the exact problem, please put them in touch so we can help you better serve your customer.

Problem: Some founders are so focused on growing their business and working on product/sales/biz dev/funding that they sometimes can't keep up with the customer development/feedback process. A good problem to have.

Example: I recently had lunch with a founder with $1M ARR, 100% growth rate, who basically told me that his support has seen zero process improvements for the past two years. Everything is manual. They had been growing so fast, so busy onboarding customers and responding to product issues that there was no time to create a better customer life-cycle process.

Solution: Customer success as a service to help startups get a pulse on customer happiness by analyzing feedback and designing process and UI improvements that thinks a few steps ahead. Give us your customer feedback (text and/or voice) and we will tell you what your customers are thinking, what's not working, and processes/UI/UX that will eliminate the issue they are having.

dylanhassinger 11 years ago |

No.

- Its the founder's (and company culture's) job to always be taking feedback and improving processes. If a founder can't find at least a little bit of time to implement suggestions that their customers or their team have, then they're not going to be able to find the the time it would take to implement suggestions you give them.

- Even if they did, what would they pay for this / how do you grow a real business around it? For B2B non funded apps, you need at least a $100/month per user.

- This sounds like a consultancy, not an app. It would make for an interesting "productized service" but pricing it would be tricky.

my 2 cents

macguyver 11 years ago | |

Thanks for the feedback, particularly on the pricing.

Agreed with all of the first point. Based on firsthand experience working at 3 startups and with a handful of business owners, I hypothesize that there are a large number of founders who are indeed interested in acting on the suggestions. It's not every founder, but many that I've worked with are open to finding what works and trying along the way.

Problem #1: Some founders are not that good at understanding their customers. Working with customers is an art, just like sales, in that there's no cookie cutter solution or exact steps like assembling widgets on a factory line. Interpersonal communication is uniquely human and can't be automated. Of course persuading them to change habits can be hard, but maybe not when framed in the perspective of the bottom line.

If this is indeed a consultancy, how would you price it? Based on email/call volume or users?

dylanhassinger 11 years ago | | |

This might help - http://casjam.com/resources/productize-your-service/

vitovito 11 years ago |

I tried something along these lines a decade ago, offering infrastructure for developer relations, for companies that were interested in productizing and licensing their technology to developers, but didn't know what to do.

Found no buyers, because the companies that were interested in outsourcing this, weren't interested in changing their internal practices to accommodate the feedback that their new customers were providing. I would have been fighting against the people cutting my paycheck.

The companies that were willing to change their internal practices, weren't interested in me, because infrastructure is not the hardest part of this: culture change is.

macguyver 11 years ago | |

Interesting observations.

How long did you work on this before you came to the conclusion? How many companies did you approach? Who (and what titles) did you speak with?

vitovito 11 years ago | | |

Nine months? Three or four companies in the particular space I was in? I talked with both the tech owners and the company owners in all but one case.

I had just come off of three years building a developer relations platform that drove one of their competitors basically out of business. The relationship was not smooth, however; it was financially successful for them, but I butted heads with them constantly, again, because they didn't want to change their culture or processes, and I had scores of customer evidence that they needed to. They wanted to finally bring it in-house, so I thought I'd try it again elsewhere.

One company realized, as they talked with me about it, they would have the same problem: they hadn't realized what "doing it right" actually entailed, and weren't prepared for an internal culture shift. They brought this up with me directly and I agreed, and we stopped talking.

The other three just stopped talking, and I inferred it was something similar from how they were behaving during the initial discussions (I only received feedback later from one of them).

I've had related experience talking with startups over the last couple of years. I don't generally try to help startups that don't already know they need customer development and product/UX design. It's not an effective use of my time to teach you the value of design when there are other startups who already understand my value. (In addition, unless you're talking exclusively with VC-backed startups, most startups can't afford to pay you.) As design includes user research and customer feedback, I feel these are the same issues you'd run into. I think you're underestimating the amount of culture change you'd need to effect.

Your business proposition sounds a little like a managed Get Satisfaction. You triage the boards and collect feedback and provide some UI comps... to whom? To the C-suite guy who hired you? And then he demands it of the product manager and tech lead, to fit it into the roadmap? The roadmap they previously had full control over? What is the priority of these changes over all the other changes that had been signed-off on? And that's how your changes get swept aside, and your contract doesn't get renewed because none of your changes ever made it into a release.

Every person in that company is used to doing their own thing, or they'd already be taking feedback in from customers and supporting them better. You may need to convince an entire chain of people to implement your changes, and then a whole other chain of people to implement instrumentation and reporting in the app so you can see patterns of use in the app, and then a whole other chain of people to implement servers to collect that data, and then a whole other chain of people to analyze that data, then then a whole other chain of people to let you go interview customers directly (because data can't tell you why they're behaving that way), and then back to the first chain to change the roadmap even more.

That sounds exhausting and expensive, why would anyone let you do that if they're already making a million dollars a year?

Perhaps there's a narrow niche of change you could effect, a very limited subset of non-threatening, incremental change, like Draft Revise does with its A/B-testing-as-a-service. But if the entire internal chain of command isn't banging down your door to help them change their culture and processes, I'm not sure I'd invest myself in the work, as it's not likely to stick.