7 ms·

How I manage customer feedback for my bootstrapped SaaS

252 points by tnolet 7y ago

mrskitch 7y ago
Nice work, Tim! Glad to see you’re still doing well, hoping the best for you and ChecklyHQ. I’ve also thought and noticed similar results with the on-site chat UIs. I really don’t like them from a consumer perspective, but they sure do get used a lot. We went with small.chat since I practically live in Slack anymore. We’ll see how that plays out. Thanks for the write up!
- tnolet 7y ago
  Tnx! And yeah, I was totally wrong about chat widgets.
sosodev 7y ago
FYI one of the images on your landing page has a z-index that's higher than the navbar.
- tnolet 7y ago
  good catch! Tnx
zild3d 7y ago
Thanks, super helpful as another bootstrapping just-2-founders team. Also - for the public roadmap, trello works really well for this https://blog.trello.com/going-public-roadmapping-with-a-public-trello-board https://blog.trello.com/going-public-roadmapping-with-a-publ...
andrethegiant 7y ago
I'd suggest Nolt for the public roadmap feature. There isn't a lot of whitelabelling functionality but it works in a pinch. https://nolt.io/ https://nolt.io/
- tnolet 7y ago
  Looks good, but at $25 a month I'd rather use free until I have a spot for it on my monthly expenses.
jedberg 7y ago
Not surprised about the chat widgets. I too hate the ones that pop up and make noise, but I've used them more than once when I needed help. They seem to be the quickest response!
- jeromegv 7y ago
  Same. I run an e-commerce site and waited and waited before I put one up, I just thought they were annoying (even with no sound) and rarely used. God was I wrong. Within the first day I was making sales over people asking questions on the chat and ordering right away.
seanwilson 7y ago
> I was SUPER skeptical about the chat widget. I personally found them annoying, overbearing and could not imagine them working for customer support or sales. > Boy was I wrong. As in completely, utterly, totally wrong. I've found a chat widget really helpful for my own product (https://www.checkbot.io/ https://www.checkbot.io/) - I find the reduced lag of the chat format means problems get resolved quicker on both ends and the style of replying (e.g. maybe 16 short messages back and forth with chat via 4 longer ones with email) results in you getting more information and making more of a connection with your users. I use the free tier of https://crisp.chat https://crisp.chat but most of them are fairly similar for basic usage. I would say avoid using one that has that annoying "Hey! You! How can I help?" automatic pop-up feature though.
- wjossey 7y ago
  I'm a big fan of the team at Drift, as the product itself is very good- They just make it really easy to have their product be annoying which is why so many of us complain about that. I will also say we use live chat extensively in our product and it's nothing but great. We have a sub 1 minute median response rate for all chat requests, and our customers love it. Great support matters, and chat is great support.
  - seanwilson 7y ago
    > We have a sub 1 minute median response rate for all chat requests, and our customers love it. Great support matters, and chat is great support. When the person replying on chat is knowledgable and is able to reply quickly, it's a great support experience on both ends I think. Automatic pop-ups, bots replying instead of humans and unhelpful support staff is what gives chat a bad reputation but when used right I think chat can be an order of magnitude improvement over email. Email can be used badly as well - I find some large companies take several days to reply to support emails and have staff that mostly reply with templates triggered by a few words in your message instead of understanding what you're asking.
    - wjossey 7y ago
osrec 7y ago
We just installed a chat widget on https://usebx.com https://usebx.com and can confirm that it not only helps conversions, but has become the main support channel. I personally never found them too annoying, but hesitated to add one to our landing page because of the general negativity surrounding them on HN.
- tnolet 7y ago
  Negative on HN is mostly positive in real life!
  - osrec 7y ago
    Haha, often true. We're a critical bunch :p
gnicholas 7y ago
I'm considering adding a chat option to my site but am wondering how to decide when to make myself available as a solo founder. That is, I don't want my phone buzzing at me whenever I'm awake, as that would drive me (and more importantly, my wife) crazy. How do folks decide when to have these chat options available, to balance growth/customer support with having a life?
- Jack000 7y ago
  I'm curious too. I just let most of my chat messages go to email. How do you hire for this, especially when the message volume is low (eg. average 1 per 10 minutes or so)
  - gnicholas 7y ago
    If you let messages go to email, do they come through with an email address you can respond to? I'd imagine that email replies that begin "I'm the founder of X" probably get a better-than-average open rate. At the same time, I wouldn't want to frustrate people who typed something into what appeared to be a live chat window — expecting a live human — and got either a bot or a delayed email response (after a request for email address, of course). Seems like there's definitely upside potential here, but also the risk of frustrating/angering people. I'd hope there's a way to hide the chat box during certain hours, to mitigate the latter.
    - Jack000 7y ago
      the user have to reenter their email, so it's opt in. some people do expect a live response, but some also expect a bot. People have come to associate chat bubbles with chat bots I think
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  If you are on your own right now, don't do it yet. As one man team, you'd probably only have an hour a day to deal with it and people will find it annoying,as they tend to expect quick response when it comes to chat. Last year I was checking on this product(saas of sorts).It turns out it's just one guy behind it,who does it all. He had a calendar plugin on his website,where you can select a meeting time based on his availability.Worked like a charm. If your product is highly transactional,you may want a different approach then.
ryeguy_24 7y ago
I like your product. Slightly off topic, but how did you initially 1) validate your idea and 2) get your first customers for private beta?
- tnolet 7y ago
  The idea needed very little validation. There are many monitoring tools out there. I kinda think of myself as the Digital Ocean vs AWS. First customers was Betalist and some blogposts
lostsock 7y ago
We have a chat widget for our product aimed at elemantary school teachers and they absolutely love it. We get everything from random praise, to sales inquiries, to technical support questions, questions about the resources themselves, pedagogical questions. We use slaask.com (which incidently I first saw on HN) so each incoming chat request is just a new channel on slack, super easy to use and a huge feature for us. In fact it's one of the most often commented on part of the presentation where we ask prospective clients to say hi and they get an answer back from a real person within seconds, it's really helped our conversion rates.
stickfigure 7y ago
We built our entire sales inquiry, customer support, and help system around intercom.io. It cost $50/mo for the first year (their startup introductory plan) but we never would have gotten off the ground without it. At launch our product was pretty raw and the documentation was thin; we got through that period by being constantly on top of customer support. Customers are incredibly forgiving when they feel that they're being listened to. This kind of support is one of those "things that don't scale" that you can do in the early stage to build a foothold while you refine your product.
- paxys 7y ago
  It can scale if you invest the necessary resources into it. Slack's customer support is a good example.
PudgePacket 7y ago
The "check interval" tooltip for business on your pricing page doesn't match what's in the table :), thanks for the cool post thought!

252 points by tnolet 7y ago

Nice work, Tim! Glad to see you’re still doing well, hoping the best for you and ChecklyHQ. I’ve also thought and noticed similar results with the on-site chat UIs. I really don’t like them from a consumer perspective, but they sure do get used a lot. We went with small.chat since I practically live in Slack anymore. We’ll see how that plays out. Thanks for the write up!

tnolet 7y ago
Tnx! And yeah, I was totally wrong about chat widgets.

sosodev 7y ago

FYI one of the images on your landing page has a z-index that's higher than the navbar.

tnolet 7y ago
good catch! Tnx

zild3d 7y ago

Thanks, super helpful as another bootstrapping just-2-founders team. Also - for the public roadmap, trello works really well for this https://blog.trello.com/going-public-roadmapping-with-a-public-trello-board https://blog.trello.com/going-public-roadmapping-with-a-publ...

andrethegiant 7y ago

I'd suggest Nolt for the public roadmap feature. There isn't a lot of whitelabelling functionality but it works in a pinch. https://nolt.io/ https://nolt.io/

tnolet 7y ago
Looks good, but at $25 a month I'd rather use free until I have a spot for it on my monthly expenses.

jedberg 7y ago

Not surprised about the chat widgets. I too hate the ones that pop up and make noise, but I've used them more than once when I needed help. They seem to be the quickest response!

jeromegv 7y ago
Same. I run an e-commerce site and waited and waited before I put one up, I just thought they were annoying (even with no sound) and rarely used. God was I wrong. Within the first day I was making sales over people asking questions on the chat and ordering right away.

seanwilson 7y ago

> I was SUPER skeptical about the chat widget. I personally found them annoying, overbearing and could not imagine them working for customer support or sales. > Boy was I wrong. As in completely, utterly, totally wrong. I've found a chat widget really helpful for my own product (https://www.checkbot.io/ https://www.checkbot.io/) - I find the reduced lag of the chat format means problems get resolved quicker on both ends and the style of replying (e.g. maybe 16 short messages back and forth with chat via 4 longer ones with email) results in you getting more information and making more of a connection with your users. I use the free tier of https://crisp.chat https://crisp.chat but most of them are fairly similar for basic usage. I would say avoid using one that has that annoying "Hey! You! How can I help?" automatic pop-up feature though.

wjossey 7y ago
I'm a big fan of the team at Drift, as the product itself is very good- They just make it really easy to have their product be annoying which is why so many of us complain about that. I will also say we use live chat extensively in our product and it's nothing but great. We have a sub 1 minute median response rate for all chat requests, and our customers love it. Great support matters, and chat is great support.
- seanwilson 7y ago
  > We have a sub 1 minute median response rate for all chat requests, and our customers love it. Great support matters, and chat is great support. When the person replying on chat is knowledgable and is able to reply quickly, it's a great support experience on both ends I think. Automatic pop-ups, bots replying instead of humans and unhelpful support staff is what gives chat a bad reputation but when used right I think chat can be an order of magnitude improvement over email. Email can be used badly as well - I find some large companies take several days to reply to support emails and have staff that mostly reply with templates triggered by a few words in your message instead of understanding what you're asking.
  - wjossey 7y ago

osrec 7y ago

We just installed a chat widget on https://usebx.com https://usebx.com and can confirm that it not only helps conversions, but has become the main support channel. I personally never found them too annoying, but hesitated to add one to our landing page because of the general negativity surrounding them on HN.

tnolet 7y ago
Negative on HN is mostly positive in real life!
- osrec 7y ago
  Haha, often true. We're a critical bunch :p

gnicholas 7y ago

I'm considering adding a chat option to my site but am wondering how to decide when to make myself available as a solo founder. That is, I don't want my phone buzzing at me whenever I'm awake, as that would drive me (and more importantly, my wife) crazy. How do folks decide when to have these chat options available, to balance growth/customer support with having a life?

Jack000 7y ago
I'm curious too. I just let most of my chat messages go to email. How do you hire for this, especially when the message volume is low (eg. average 1 per 10 minutes or so)
- gnicholas 7y ago
  If you let messages go to email, do they come through with an email address you can respond to? I'd imagine that email replies that begin "I'm the founder of X" probably get a better-than-average open rate. At the same time, I wouldn't want to frustrate people who typed something into what appeared to be a live chat window — expecting a live human — and got either a bot or a delayed email response (after a request for email address, of course). Seems like there's definitely upside potential here, but also the risk of frustrating/angering people. I'd hope there's a way to hide the chat box during certain hours, to mitigate the latter.
  - Jack000 7y ago
    the user have to reenter their email, so it's opt in. some people do expect a live response, but some also expect a bot. People have come to associate chat bubbles with chat bots I think
cosmodisk 7y ago
If you are on your own right now, don't do it yet. As one man team, you'd probably only have an hour a day to deal with it and people will find it annoying,as they tend to expect quick response when it comes to chat. Last year I was checking on this product(saas of sorts).It turns out it's just one guy behind it,who does it all. He had a calendar plugin on his website,where you can select a meeting time based on his availability.Worked like a charm. If your product is highly transactional,you may want a different approach then.

ryeguy_24 7y ago

I like your product. Slightly off topic, but how did you initially 1) validate your idea and 2) get your first customers for private beta?

tnolet 7y ago
The idea needed very little validation. There are many monitoring tools out there. I kinda think of myself as the Digital Ocean vs AWS. First customers was Betalist and some blogposts

lostsock 7y ago

We have a chat widget for our product aimed at elemantary school teachers and they absolutely love it. We get everything from random praise, to sales inquiries, to technical support questions, questions about the resources themselves, pedagogical questions. We use slaask.com (which incidently I first saw on HN) so each incoming chat request is just a new channel on slack, super easy to use and a huge feature for us. In fact it's one of the most often commented on part of the presentation where we ask prospective clients to say hi and they get an answer back from a real person within seconds, it's really helped our conversion rates.

stickfigure 7y ago

We built our entire sales inquiry, customer support, and help system around intercom.io. It cost $50/mo for the first year (their startup introductory plan) but we never would have gotten off the ground without it. At launch our product was pretty raw and the documentation was thin; we got through that period by being constantly on top of customer support. Customers are incredibly forgiving when they feel that they're being listened to. This kind of support is one of those "things that don't scale" that you can do in the early stage to build a foothold while you refine your product.

paxys 7y ago
It can scale if you invest the necessary resources into it. Slack's customer support is a good example.

PudgePacket 7y ago

The "check interval" tooltip for business on your pricing page doesn't match what's in the table :), thanks for the cool post thought!