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Well, we're a SaaS company that sells business-to-business so things are probably different. One paying customer for us is probably like 10 or 100 for you. We

by jnovek 17y ago

Well, we're a SaaS company that sells business-to-business so things are probably different. One paying customer for us is probably like 10 or 100 for you. We entered what you might call a "saturated" market about 10 months ago. What we did was: 1) We made our product much, much better than the competition, who were all pretty stagnant. 2) We marketed our product directly. Like, calling potential customers on the phone. 3) For each customer that we won, we rolled out the red carpet and tried to give them everything we reasonable could. 4) We taught some of our customers to be evangelists. Although we're just barely ramen profitable, we have piles of opportunities. Our sales cycle can be anywhere from 2 to 6 months, and we have lots of potential customers that we think are almost there.

alex_c 17y ago
4) We taught some of our customers to be evangelists. This is obviously not an issue for all products, but how do you teach customers to be evangelists if most other potential customers are their competitors? In fact, scrap that. Can you expand a little on how you accomplished this, in general?
- jnovek 17y ago
  Well, our customers are newspapers who are remarkably collaborative. They aren't usually competitors because they're geographically bound. I'm not sure if there's a magic formula to turn a customer into an evangelist. For us, a big part of it was being responsive, trying to find out what they wanted and giving it to them. We've found that most newspaper publishers have a secret ideas that they've been kicking around about how they would like to change advertising, and some of these ideas are quite good. Of course, this doesn't scale forever, but we will do it as long as we can. So far, customer evangelism has been key to our growth.
- lloydarmbrust 17y ago
  I'm Jnovek's co-founder. We deal with businesses who are used to being trampled on, so impressing them is really not that hard--but here's a quick list of some of the things we've done: 1) We're honest and super-fast in responding to problems. This is huge, even if you say, "whoa, we have no idea what's wrong but we're working on it" that makes them feel like you care. 2) If anything does break, we're quick to give discounts. I firmly believe that if our product doesn't perform as advertised then our customer shouldn't have to pay for it. 3) I take any chance I can to "wow" them. For example, once an employee of one of our clients had to do a bunch of extra work to make our product work on their platform, while on the phone I had overheard her talking about how excited she was to go see New Kids on the Block in concert and so we had a NKTB shirt sent to her the next day. It cost us $50 but we have that client's love forever. 4) We send letters. Real letters. (In the mail.) When you send someone a hand-written note in the mail, they know you took the time to make that happen--little things add up to big things. 5) We ask our clients for suggestions, and work with them to make the product work better for them. It's very important that our client is making money with our product--not just paying us for it. 6) I try to understand how their business works and uses our product. For example, if I know they are usually busy on Wednesdays, I'll write that down and call them on another day. When you sit down with a client, talk about their problems, and try to build products that solve those problems they get really excited--when you use their ideas, they feel like they have ownership of your product. How does this pay off? We have clients who go to events and speak to others in their field about our product. And most of our clients are happy to receive calls from others about our business. Our self-appointed evangelist clients are probably worth more to our company than the code we write.

by jnovek 17y ago

alex_c 17y ago

4) We taught some of our customers to be evangelists. This is obviously not an issue for all products, but how do you teach customers to be evangelists if most other potential customers are their competitors? In fact, scrap that. Can you expand a little on how you accomplished this, in general?

jnovek 17y ago
Well, our customers are newspapers who are remarkably collaborative. They aren't usually competitors because they're geographically bound. I'm not sure if there's a magic formula to turn a customer into an evangelist. For us, a big part of it was being responsive, trying to find out what they wanted and giving it to them. We've found that most newspaper publishers have a secret ideas that they've been kicking around about how they would like to change advertising, and some of these ideas are quite good. Of course, this doesn't scale forever, but we will do it as long as we can. So far, customer evangelism has been key to our growth.
lloydarmbrust 17y ago
I'm Jnovek's co-founder. We deal with businesses who are used to being trampled on, so impressing them is really not that hard--but here's a quick list of some of the things we've done: 1) We're honest and super-fast in responding to problems. This is huge, even if you say, "whoa, we have no idea what's wrong but we're working on it" that makes them feel like you care. 2) If anything does break, we're quick to give discounts. I firmly believe that if our product doesn't perform as advertised then our customer shouldn't have to pay for it. 3) I take any chance I can to "wow" them. For example, once an employee of one of our clients had to do a bunch of extra work to make our product work on their platform, while on the phone I had overheard her talking about how excited she was to go see New Kids on the Block in concert and so we had a NKTB shirt sent to her the next day. It cost us $50 but we have that client's love forever. 4) We send letters. Real letters. (In the mail.) When you send someone a hand-written note in the mail, they know you took the time to make that happen--little things add up to big things. 5) We ask our clients for suggestions, and work with them to make the product work better for them. It's very important that our client is making money with our product--not just paying us for it. 6) I try to understand how their business works and uses our product. For example, if I know they are usually busy on Wednesdays, I'll write that down and call them on another day. When you sit down with a client, talk about their problems, and try to build products that solve those problems they get really excited--when you use their ideas, they feel like they have ownership of your product. How does this pay off? We have clients who go to events and speak to others in their field about our product. And most of our clients are happy to receive calls from others about our business. Our self-appointed evangelist clients are probably worth more to our company than the code we write.