4 ms·

It’s interesting how hard it is to gauge the value of tools you don’t yet use. I’m the founder of a startup that recently subscribed to Gripeless (https://useg

It’s interesting how hard it is to gauge the value of tools you don’t yet use. I’m the founder of a startup that recently subscribed to Gripeless (https://usegripeless.com https://usegripeless.com). If you look at the Show HN thread and the other threads about Gripeless floating around the internet, you’ll see a lot of commenters saying “this is too expensive”, “I don’t see anyone buying this” or something along those lines. I was skeptical too, but we tried it on the production site anyways, since the integration took less than 10 minutes. Turns out it’s more than paid for itself in the first month. We immediately caught 3 important issues and fixed them. I thought the value-add would stop here: our startup gained an unquantifiable amount of value (a la fixing bugs we would never catch otherwise). But it turns out there was a hidden treasure even more valuable and concrete. I personally reached out to the 3 users who submitted a Gripe, letting them know we were fixing their issue right away and asking if they wanted to hop on a phone call sometime. This effectively onboarded all 3 of them. I feel confident that Gripeless is going to continue to drive much more revenue than it costs. That experience has led me to be less apprehensive about spending cash on additional tools. I’m not going to sign up for 28 of them, but I am more opening to trying them out and quickly cutting them if they don’t work.

arkitaip 7y ago
That's the main issue of purchasing products and services for you business, i.e it's almost impossible to gauge the real value of what you are buying until you try it out and can analyze the figures. This is why it's crazy that so many sass providers still require credit cards upfront or have an arbitrary 14 days trial period instead of having a free plan with unlimited trial period. It removes so many obstacles from the founder's decision-making process without costing the provider much money.
- gumby 7y ago
  Sometimes it’s hard to come up with an adequately differentiated set of features for free vs paid, especially when you’re still in or close to the mvp phase.
vasco 7y ago
Hotjar does this (collect user feedback in the page) and more and has a free plan. I work there so I'm biased, but yeah.
- rsify 7y ago
  I'm also biased because I work on Gripeless. Our product isn't really about broadly collecting feedback as a whole, but it instead focuses specifically on the negative feedback part and tries to make it as pleasant and friction-less as possible for the end user to submit. HotJar's feedback tool is built around getting all kinds of feedback, both positive and negative, which is generally fine if you want to improve your product satisfaction when comparing "happiness" at different time frames, but it does come with some caveats. Since people don't want to be rude by nature it's less likely that they'd explicitly pick the most angry face option on HotJar's happiness slider and submit their complain then - as they, again, would have to explicitly state that they're dissatisfied. Submitting a gripe through Gripeless on the other hand takes just a single text field, no emotions, no decisions - users can simply quickly fire out their issue(s) at the product owner without any suspected judgement - since complaints are very clearly solicited. Again, I'm super biased because I'm the solo founder of Gripeless and competing against a much more established company like HotJar is not easy, as an early stage company we can't afford to give out our product for free just yet (apart from OSS projects which we always give out our product to for $0), but I try very very hard to satisfy our current customers' specific needs, something that a larger company can't offer at scale. Also if anyone reading is interested I'm doing demo's and answering concerns via quick 5 minute calls, feel free to reach me at maciej@usegripeless.com - Maciej
  - teach 7y ago
    I'd never heard of Gripeless before this thread, but I can agree with your reasoning. We use HotJar's free plan on an interal (engineer-facing) tool and we get very very few reports through it because engineers don't realize there's a text field AFTER the happiness slider. We get an order of magnitude more feedback via Jira even though creating a ticket that way takes 10x more clicks.

arkitaip 7y ago

That's the main issue of purchasing products and services for you business, i.e it's almost impossible to gauge the real value of what you are buying until you try it out and can analyze the figures. This is why it's crazy that so many sass providers still require credit cards upfront or have an arbitrary 14 days trial period instead of having a free plan with unlimited trial period. It removes so many obstacles from the founder's decision-making process without costing the provider much money.

gumby 7y ago
Sometimes it’s hard to come up with an adequately differentiated set of features for free vs paid, especially when you’re still in or close to the mvp phase.

vasco 7y ago

Hotjar does this (collect user feedback in the page) and more and has a free plan. I work there so I'm biased, but yeah.

rsify 7y ago
I'm also biased because I work on Gripeless. Our product isn't really about broadly collecting feedback as a whole, but it instead focuses specifically on the negative feedback part and tries to make it as pleasant and friction-less as possible for the end user to submit. HotJar's feedback tool is built around getting all kinds of feedback, both positive and negative, which is generally fine if you want to improve your product satisfaction when comparing "happiness" at different time frames, but it does come with some caveats. Since people don't want to be rude by nature it's less likely that they'd explicitly pick the most angry face option on HotJar's happiness slider and submit their complain then - as they, again, would have to explicitly state that they're dissatisfied. Submitting a gripe through Gripeless on the other hand takes just a single text field, no emotions, no decisions - users can simply quickly fire out their issue(s) at the product owner without any suspected judgement - since complaints are very clearly solicited. Again, I'm super biased because I'm the solo founder of Gripeless and competing against a much more established company like HotJar is not easy, as an early stage company we can't afford to give out our product for free just yet (apart from OSS projects which we always give out our product to for $0), but I try very very hard to satisfy our current customers' specific needs, something that a larger company can't offer at scale. Also if anyone reading is interested I'm doing demo's and answering concerns via quick 5 minute calls, feel free to reach me at maciej@usegripeless.com - Maciej
- teach 7y ago
  I'd never heard of Gripeless before this thread, but I can agree with your reasoning. We use HotJar's free plan on an interal (engineer-facing) tool and we get very very few reports through it because engineers don't realize there's a text field AFTER the happiness slider. We get an order of magnitude more feedback via Jira even though creating a ticket that way takes 10x more clicks.