WebEngage

webengage

Note: My experience in customer development has been largely with SaaS (B2B) startups. Therefore, many of my lessons may not be directly applicable in a B2C scenario. I conducted a a few months ago, on customer development as part of the initiative. Much of the content in this post is derived from the notes I had prepared for that workshop. workshop ProductNation I’ve divided this post into the following 3 sections: What is Customer Development? How Customer Development Works Closing Notes In the 2 years I spent in the product and growth team at , I spoke with hundreds of customers on the phone. The primary objective of this customer development exercise at BrowserStack was to improve the product and build new features to drive growth for the company. BrowserStack What is Customer Development? Customer development is certainly not asking your customers what they want and then building it. What customer development really does is help identify the right problems to solve so that you build something that your customers will buy. Additionally, it helps you validate your hypothesis and assumptions. The idea is to spend more time speaking with your customers and less time and money on engineering and design. I cannot overemphasize the importance of identifying the right problems to solve. BrowserStack gets this right. I was told by the CEO there that solutions are relatively easy but identifying the right problem to solve is not. I couldn’t agree more. In sum, customer development doesn’t provide you with all the answers on what to build. But it definitely provides a better understanding of customers and a keener appreciation of the problems they grapple with. You will still need a founder or a product manager to sift through all the information to determine what is relevant, prioritize the inputs received and decide how to turn the inputs into a tangible feature or a product. How Customer Development Works? 1. Start With Your Hypotheses A good point to start the the process of customer development is with some hypotheses you’re trying to validate. If you’re building a new product from scratch, there will be some hypotheses you have about the industry or the problems you think your potential customers face. Your logical next step then would be to get on a call with your potential customers and find out as much as you can about their problems before you even start building anything. This step is applicable to even a small feature you’re trying to build for an already existing product. For example, in BrowserStack, one of the hypotheses we had was that occasional usage of the product was one of the biggest contributing factors to a high churn rate. Therefore, our customer development exercise in this case was focused on understanding the behavior and day-to-day activities of our customers and the availability of alternatives as a result of which they were canceling their subscriptions. 2. Identify Your Users In order to validate your hypothesis, you need to speak with your customers or your potential customers if you don’t already have a product. Therefore, let’s first identify who your ideal customers are or who your ideal customers could be. You should be able to define your ideal customers through a mix of the following parameters: . Let’s call the different sets of ideal customers created through the parameters above as user personas. For example, in BrowserStack, one of the personas was in in the . Industry, Size of company (based on the number of employees or revenue), Region, Role/Function, Title QA Managers Enterprises (1000+ employees) Technology (Software) industry 3. Create a List of Users to Speak With Once you’ve identified your user personas, you need to create an actual list of users you could speak with. If you already have a product that is being used by customers, then creating the list is not a problem. However, do note that the user personas of your free and paid product could be different and you will need to speak with the relevant ones based on the problem you’re trying to solve. If you’re building a new product, in addition to reaching out to your personal network, you could also scour LinkedIn for potential contacts and get in touch with them over LinkedIn itself or through Twitter. Quora could also be a place where you could identify people you could speak with. Once you start this exercise, you will realize that people are actually not that averse to speaking with you. They do it for different reasons. At BrowserStack, people loved the product and they loved propagating the product in their organization. Who wouldn’t want to be known as the person who introduced and evangelized an amazing product in their company? We had many such users at BrowserStack. Scheduling calls with them was a breeze. Some others are just willing to help. And many others feel important when you tell them that this exercise is limited to a certain number of people and that their inputs would help shape the future of a product or a business. 4. Get in Touch With Your Users Once you’ve created this list of users, reach out to them through email to schedule a call or an in-person meeting. Among the customers you reach out to, the response rates for the ones willing to get on the phone with you depend on how you sell to your customers. For self-service sales (as was the case with BrowserStack), around 20% of the free users (those without a subscription) I reached out to were willing to get on the phone with me. For paid users, the response rate was as high as 50% to 70%. For inside-sales or field sales (as is the case at , the startup I work with currently), almost all the customers want to speak with me. WebEngage Following is an example of an email I had sent to some of our registered users on BrowserStack who had not purchased a subscription. Once they responded with an answer, I was successful in requesting them to get on the phone with me to answer some of the other questions I had based on their first reply. Example of an email I sent to customers at BrowserStack I have a slight preference for conducting customer development studies over the phone than through in-person meetings. I can take notes during the call without distracting the customer whereas taking notes in an in-person meeting can be a distraction for the other person. I have done some customer development studies on Email as well but these have been mostly for very specific questions I had. I personally don’t prefer online surveys. I think these should only be done when you already have some options/solutions in mind and you’re only seeking help from your customers to validate and prioritize. If you’re doing customer development over the phone, take into consideration the timezone your users reside in and suggest time-slots to them based on their time zones. Use or to figure out where your customers are located. Also, ask them for their mobile numbers specifically. I’ve had people not join the scheduled conference calls in the past as they forgot about it or missed the calendar reminder. And I tend to now ask them directly for their mobile numbers as the odds of the call happening are much better in this case. LinkedIn Rapportive Lastly, for the emails you send out to schedule these calls, remember to follow up with a 2nd email to those who did not respond to your 1st email. I cannot overemphasize the power of the follow up. Half my calls at BrowserStack got scheduled through the follow up! Needless to say the emails have to be personalized. Nobody likes signing up for some generic customer study. Here’s an example of a follow-up email I had sent to the customers at BrowserStack: Example of a follow-up email I sent to customers at BrowserStack 5. Ask Your Users These Questions In this section, I’ll cover some of the questions I always ask customers. This is not an exhaustive list and your exact list of questions will differ based on the hypothesis you’re trying to validate. I generally tend to prepare around 15 to 20 questions that I need answers to during the call. Of course, the order in which I ask my questions is dynamic and depends completely on how the call is going. In my experience, open-ended questions work much better than close-ended ones. I tend to not ask the user to choose among options or what they think about a particular solution. I’ve realized that I only end up biasing the user or constraining their thinking with such close-ended questions. An example of a close-ended question is ? Instead of asking the user to choose between two options, I tend to ask more questions about the problem the user is facing. Do you prefer A or B Following are some basic questions I usually include in my customer development calls: About the company (what it does, industry, number of employees) About the person (objectives, responsibilities at work etc.) Their single biggest challenge and other problems they face The last time they faced the problem(s) and how often do they face it. This helps you in understanding whether the problem is occasional or if it is persistent. It might be difficult to build a business around a product that solves only occasional problems for a user How does this problem impact their business or how much time and money does this problem cost their company. This helps in understanding the gravity of the problem. Even if the problem is persistent, if it doesn’t cost the customer substantial time and money, he/she wouldn’t be that keen on solving the problem How are they currently solving the problem? Even if the user claims that the problem is persistent and that it results in a substantial loss of time and money, let’s try to validate this. If the problem is big enough, the user would already have some sort of solution to alleviate the problem. If there is no solution currently, then is the problem as grave as the user is making it out to be? Problems with their current solution If there was anything I didn’t ask them that I should have 6. Take Notes & Summarize Take copious notes during your call. Record your calls so that you can refer to them later. As soon as your call is done, create a summary of what was discussed during the call. When you start doing multiple such calls in a day, it becomes difficult to remember who said what. Once all your calls are done, create a summary of all the call logs in one place. Look for patterns in the summary and try converting these patterns into solid findings. Based on these findings you will be able to determine the plan of action for your product. Of course, this entire customer development process is iterative in nature. You will take these inputs, build a product or feature or create a strategy and put that into practice, do more of the customer development to validate what you’ve built and so on. Lastly, while the process of customer development is continuous in nature where you’re speaking with your customers on almost a daily/weekly/fortnightly basis, the majority of customer development tends to happen in the initial stages when you’re trying to validate your hypothesis. Closing Notes You will start seeing some patterns as soon you have made between 10 and 15 calls. Later user interactions tend to yield similar patterns. Hence, you may decide to conclude customer development studies for the your hypothesis when you stop hearing new things. Each call can take anywhere between 30 and 45 minutes. I would not suggest doing more than 4 customer development calls or meetings in a day as the process can be exhausting. Remember, in addition to just speaking with your customers, you’re also taking notes and summarizing the discussion as soon as you’re done with the call. If your product has been in the market for a few years, you could also consider putting together a that you can depend on for testing your initial hypothesis and for validating your solution. While I was at BrowserStack, our competitor had put together this board. This made their customers feel important. So much so that some of them had updated their LinkedIn profile to mention that they were a part of this board. Customer Advisory Board SauceLabs At BrowserStack, we employed customer development to build features addressing a number of problems eg. increasing conversion, reducing churn, revamping pricing etc. In the future, I will cover some of the specifics of how we went about solving these problems and the role that customer development played in tackling these problems.

How to Use Customer Development to Build Your Product

In my current role at , my primary responsibility is to build a retention marketing product for B2C companies that would help them drive revenues from their existing customers. WebEngage Our product has been around for a while. While we’ve been iterating on the product almost on a daily basis, there came a time when we wanted to take a structured approach to building the product, both from a short-term and long-term perspective. It’s the usual process of evolution that any product in any startup goes through. We wanted to add many new features to the product. We also wanted to make changes to the existing functionality of the product. As such, we were able to quickly put together a list of almost 200 items that we wanted to work on over the next few quarters. The inputs for this exercise came from our customers, the insights from the team members at WebEngage and understanding what our competitors were upto. In some ways, we had built a highly unorganized product roadmap. Creating the roadmap was easy. Prioritizing the 200 items on the roadmap, wasn’t. Therefore, my immediate task was to quickly find a way to organize these items in their order of priority. In my product roadmap research, I came across many articles that went into the details of how prioritisation can be done. A lot of it seemed unnecessarily complicated. In this post, I wanted to distill some of those learnings into creating a simple framework that companies can use to prioritize items on a product roadmap. Segregate Items into Themes Any product roadmap should have certain themes around which the product is going to get built over time. Each item on the product roadmap is then mapped to a specific theme. You could then prioritise the themes themselves based on the business goals such that you end up tackling only 3 or 4 themes in a particular quarter. Of course, the ideal process would be to first define the themes and then build a list of items that fits into each of these themes. In our case, we also ensured that we picked only those items that impacted a majority of our existing and potential customers. What are themes? Themes could be as specific as , , or as generic as , etc. Ideally, each of these themes should move some metric for the company. Reducing churn by increasing engagement Increasing the on-boarding and activation rate Increasing sign-up to purchase conversions Improving the overall UX Making the system scalable In our case, since we already had a wishlist of items we wanted to work on, I decided to attach broad themes to each of those items. Broad themes suited our requirements better than specific themes as our product is still in the early stages of the product evolution lifecycle. The next time we build a roadmap, it will mostly be around very specific themes. Instead of creating 10 or 15 different themes and then prioritising the themes, I decided to instead limit the number of themes to just 5. Based on inputs from the management, I then realised that our immediate needs for the next couple of quarters were served by just 3 out of those 5 themes. Below is the list of the top 3 highest priority themes for us along which the product was going to evolve over the next couple of quarters: Build new analytical features to drive user engagement Build a beautiful user experience to make the product simple and intuitive thereby increasing conversions Scale our systems to drive stability to cater to the massive growth in the number of customers Having segregated items into themes, the next problem I encountered was to prioritize the various items in each of these themes as each theme had about 30 to 40 items linked to it. Urgency, Effort and Impact We then decided to rate each item in those 3 themes on the following parameters: : On a scale of 1 to 5, how urgent was that item for our customers. 5 being most urgent and 1 being least urgent. Urgency : On a scale of 1 to 5, how much impact would that item have for our customers. 5 being maximum impact and 1 being lowest impact Impact : On a scale of 1 to 5, how much effort would it take to build that item for our customers. 5 being most effort and 1 being least effort Effort Based on these parameters, we created a formula that would calculate the total score for each of the items on the roadmap. Total Score = 100*Urgency + 10*Impact - 1*Effort The idea behind this framework was that we wanted to work on the highest urgency, maximum impact and least effort items first. Tackle the low hanging fruits first before getting to the others. The founders, the tech leads and the product lead jointly came up with a score for each of urgency, impact and effort, before the total was calculated. The scores for each of the parameters were based mostly on gut feel than any quantitative data. We wanted to avoid any form of analysis paralysis so intuition and gut feel were sufficient for our needs. Voila! Our complicated and unorganized product roadmap was now sorted in the exact order in which we should tackle those 200 items I would also like to add that our product roadmap is not cast in stone. We add new items to it or remove certain items from it, almost every other month. However, the framework above always tells us the order in which we should tackle the items on the roadmap.

Prioritizing Features at WebEngage

How we Achieved 11% Growth by Leveraging Personalization and Segment-based Product Flows

Let's learn about via these 62 free stories. They are ordered by most time reading created on HackerNoon. Visit the to find the most read stories about any technology. Content /Learn Repo 1. A Workaround to Flutter Web SEO Issue You like Flutter, but then you know that Flutter is not well optimized and has some problems with SEO. I've figured a workaround to this issue. 2. How To Acquire Early Users Through Content Marketing As the cost of paid acquisition strategies continually rise, it’s more important than ever for brands to leverage content marketing within their digital strategy. 3. The Best Content Collaboration Solutions for Content Production Comaring 9 different content collaboration tools and platforms to determine which is the best for developer blog management. 4. TRON + Streaming Solution = Barrier-Free Content Consumption We live in a day and age where technology has made everything easy. 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The Effect of Blockchain Technology on Content Creation The blockchain gives content creators all over the world to gain full control over their income. Everyone from artists to photographers can earn at all levels 9. "Decentralized Social Networks Are More Interested in How To Store Content Than Quality" Adam Todd And unlike Digitex, Blockster is starting out with a working platform and a full-strength team, and a CEO who has already made all the mistakes 10. How We Recreate the Idea of Educational Content [Part #1] Physical textbooks are reprinted once a year at best according to the waterfall process. Their content becomes outdated way before it’s published. And if a textbook is not commercially successful, it means financial losses for the company. One of the solutions is to create digital content right from the start, not just digitalize published content. This would allow for updates on the spot and the creation of customized materials that can be then published. 11. 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Deconstructing Content Marketing [Deep Dive] Before the SaaS revolution started booming, software companies used to be incredibly sales-driven, and the processes they focused on were plain old-school — aggressive engagement with customers and persuasive discussions centered around the product were known to be the norm. 59. 'The Word "Hacking" isn't Used Accurately Today' - Tom Rutka, '19 #Noonies Hacker Of The Year Hey there Hackers: it’s now August, the month of Hacker Noon’s 2020 Noonies Awards season! Visit noonies.tech before public nominations close at Noon MT on 12 August 2020 to nominate your Product Manager of the Year; best-in-class Blockchain contributors, analysts, influencers; Software Development innovators, and more. 60. Should Twitter Implement a Downvote Button? In this slogging thread, the technology channel took the chance to discuss the latest news about Twitter and how they're considering adding a downvote button. 61. 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62 Stories To Learn About Content

After Silicon Valley a6 Indian SaaS Startups Products that will disrupt the market in 2020nd Israel, India is the 3rd largest tech ecosystem in the World. If you walk around South India today, especially Chennai, you’ll see how Indian Entrepreneurs are centralising themselves towards SaaS. Indian SaaS Industry now revolves around deep tech, cybersecurity, defence, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning. While other regions are not as excited about SaaS products, the opportunities for SaaS are very strong in India. Just check out these success stories of Indian SaaS Startups: Freshworks, with 200,000+ customers has crossed $150 million ARR Zoho, with 450,000 customers, has clocked close to $500 Million in Revenue per year Roughly, Indian SaaS companies generate a billion dollars of revenue only from a handful of Chennai-based SaaS companies like Zoho, Freshworks, ChargeBee, KiSSFLOW, Indix, Ramco, and ChargeBee. With these SaaS companies leading the way, India now has a surge of young players that are on the way of making it a SaaS powerhouse. In this article, we have evaluated top 6 SaaS products that can disrupt the market in 2020: Troop Messenger: A compact solution that unifies communication and collaboration capabilities Troop Messenger, a Hyderabad based Indian SaaS product, is one of the most promising additions to the collaborative chat space. This business communication & collaboration tool offers messaging, video conferencing, project management, and many compact features in a simple, cohesive UI. Highlights: Troop Messenger has helped millions of project teams achieve their business goals and provide excellent results The office collaboration app is optimized for mobile devices, allowing users to seamlessly connect with team members from their phones or tablets. : Enterprise plan offers 1TB storage Storage Up to 1TB : To Find any user you by typing a name into the search bar. This feature shortens the norm of scrolling through directories and helps connect to people faster. Advanced Contact Search : Make collaborative more interactive and organise your unique workflow without limiting the number of groups. Unlimited Groups : 24/7 Professional assistance to address your requests Free chat and email support : Troop Messenger is GDPR compliant Data records : Access all of your messages, at any point of time, for as long as you want. Unlimited message history : Built-in video calling and screen sharing facility to facilitate easy delivery of project ideas and presentations Video calling and Screen Sharing : State-of-the-art reporting via a cohesive and simple admin dashboard. Business on TM have been using analytics to supervise their team members and also track individual performance. Analytics Awards & Accolades: The Top 20 Business Instant Messaging Software The Top 20 Business Instant Messaging Software High Performer 2020, Awarded by G2 Recognised as one of the best instant messaging software for business, TechTimes Certificate for Great User Experience, Awarded by Compare Camp Rising Star 2019, Awarded by Compare Camp Great User Experience 2019, Awarded by Finances Online Top Slack Alternative 2019, Awarded by Finances Online : Best Biometric Attendance Management Software in Hyderabad Time Dynamo TimeDynamo is the new age biometric attendance management software that can be conveniently installed in the office/workplace premises to access an actionable and seamless analysis of employee attendance. Highlights: Time Dynamo is Best-in-class employee attendance management system that eases attendance tracking and cuts down on the labour costs TD helps manage leaves, on-duty, overtime, holidays, shifts, & more using  a single software. Attendance: Fingerprint scanning Integration Iris scanning Integration Face scanning Integration Exception - In case of check-in / check-out missed Request and Approvals Leave request Comp-off request Permission request Swap request Schedule Management: Shift Roster( Daily / Weekly / Monthly ) Weekoff Roster ( Daily / Weekly / Monthly ) Notifications: SMS Notification Email Notification Customised Notification Employee Leave Reports: Self leave report ( Daily / Weekly / Monthly ) Team leave report ( Daily / Weekly / Monthly ) Leave graph report ( Daily / Weekly / Monthly ) Employee Attendance Reports: Self attendance report ( Daily / Weekly / Monthly ) Team attendance report ( Daily / Weekly / Monthly ) Attendance graph report ( Daily / Weekly / Monthly ) Awards & Accreditation Shortlisted as Top 10 innovative Product Showcases, by NASSCOM Recognition as one of the best workplace biometric attendance systems : Customer Live Chat Support Application Click2Magic Click2Magic, a widely popular SaaS product, has been developed by Tvisha Technologies, an Indian SaaS company. It is a stand-alone live chat support app that engages web and mobile visitors with a built-in mobile and desktop notification. Highlights: Click2Magic, as a Chat Support App, makes it easy for agents and customers to stay in touch, irrespective of their location. Since this app is cloud-based, the chats are always secure to assure customer privacy and easy access. : With this feature of Click2Magic, users can capture their leads and improve sales by organizing client contact in one centralised database Lead Capturing Management : Server side scripting and client-side scripting Dynamic Web Pages : Prioritize daily sales calls, record and make calls from the browser. Organise, build, and track better relationships with customers. CRM Campaign Management : Connect with your visitors and convert inquiries into leads, provide better support, in real time. Then use the gathered information for seamless updates of contacts and lead generation. Live Chat Widgets Awards & Accolades: Recognition as one of the best Customer Live Chat Support Application Top Lead Capturing Live Chat Support Application : Face recognition-based Time and Attendance Solution for a contractual and distributed workforce Truein Truein brings transparency and controls to the attendance process, optimizes workforce utilization, and plugs revenue leakages. It is a complete attendance solution that runs on mobile/tablet devices and provides accurate attendance. Highlights: App-based (User app and kiosk app), it can be set up anywhere, instantly Offers geo-fencing to ensure the staff mark their attendance only from approved locations Centralized controls enable a real-time view of multiple sites 70+ customizable policies as per location or staff to automate shifts, OT, late marks, and more Generates payroll ready reports with the final calculations for payroll processing Selfie-based mobile attendance for distributed staff using the Truein user app Onboarding of staff directly on the kiosk app Full-fledged leave monitoring system Awards & Accolades: Software Suggest Customers Choice Award, Winter 2022 Software Suggest User Rating Award, 2021 SourceForge Customers Choice Award Slashdot Users Rating Award, 2022 : Mobile Marketing Platform with app marketing automation CleverTap CleverTap, an SaaS based mobile marketing and customer lifetime management company, was founded in May 2013. CEO of CleverTap, Sunil Thomas, was named as one of the top marketing technology trailblazers by Advertising age in the year 2017. Highlights: Using Clevertap, businesses can engage their target customers on the right channel, with the right message, and at the right time CleverTap offers state-of-the-art behavioral analytics for businesses keen on understanding their customers better Real-time Customer Data Platform to build marketing strategies Automated Segmentation of users according to preferences, frequency, intent and recency. Campaign Optimization through machine learning, intent-based segmentation, and journey optimization.https://www.troopmessenger.com/blogs-amp/saas-companieshttps://www.troopmessenger.com/blogs-amp/saas-companies Audience Analytics using Cohort Analysis, Flows, and Funnels and Uninstall Tracking Awards & Accolades: Best Mobile Marketing Campaign (Gold) Most popular companies powering digital content Bronze Stevie® Award for Business Technology/Best Marketing Solution Top 25 entrepreneurs leading the future of technology : B2C Multi-Channel Marketing Automation WebEngage WebEngage, has gained it reputation in the SaaS industry, as a full-stack Customer Data and Marketing Automation Platform for B2C. It enables consumer businesses to automate their communication and also improve customer retention through cross-channel user engagement. Highlights: Cross Channel User Engagement is facilitated via multiple channels like Email, Text Message, Web Message, Survey, Feedback, In-App Message, Push Notifications, Facebook, Web Push, and Whatsapp. Web-Engage Journey Designer Interface has a drag and drop design for implementing the multi-channel campaigns. Actionable insights on on users of active campaigns, analytics on user and  engagement channels Target customer and user segmentations on the basis of demography, psychography, behavioristic features, and more Cross Channel User Engagement through Web-Push, Emails, Push Notifications, In-App Notifications, Web Notifications, Facebook, Survey and SMS Features that support a personalise communication that drives brand loyalty Intuitive interface to map the workflows Awards & Accolades: TiE Lumis Entrepreneurial Excellence, TiECon, 2015 NASSCOM Emerge 50, NASSCOM, 2015 Top 10 Startups To Watch In India, Mashable, 2014 The Tech List, Times of India, 2014 Techcircle Fastrack, Techcircle, 2012 Smart CEO Startup Awards 50, The Smart CEO, 2015 : A Feature Packed Suite of SaaS Products FreshWorks Freshworks offers a suite of SaaS products that include: Freshdesk: Customer Support Software Freshchat: Customer Messaging Software Freshteam: Application Tracking Software Fresh Marketer: Conversion Optimization Suite Freshservice: IT Service Management Software Freshsales: Sales CRM Software Freshcaller: Call Centre Software Freshconnect: For teams to partners and collaborate with full context Fresh Status: Hosted Public Status Pages Fresh Success: Customer Success Software Freshping: Free Website Monitoring Tool Fresh Release: Project Management Software Highlights: Software within the Freshwork suite requires minimum customization. They are easy to set up and ready to be implemented on premise. These tools are backed by world-class customer support, which has helped this company earn  trust of over 150,000 companies operating globally. CRM Software. Project Management Software. Business Intelligence Platforms. Video Conferencing Software. Expense Management Software. Accounting Software. Online Backup Software. Awards & Accolades: Collaboration Solution of the Year at UK Cloud Awards 2018 Technology Impact Awards for Company of the Year 2019 by Growth Success Great User Experience Award for 2018 G2 Crowd’s Best Software Awards 2019 Expert’s Choice Award for 2018 Clap Messenger Clap Messenger takes you to the Super app world with chat and collaboration facilities. This single portal hosts a wide range of apps, including communities, polls, surveys, document scanners, e-commerce (upcoming), etc., to help the users to stay within a unified app to achieve what they want seamlessly! Clap Messenger is a super app that takes care of your every daily need! Highlights: Unlimited Groups: You can bring in your friends, family, colleagues, and others to group chats where you can share unlimited content with them. Votocrat: With this poll and survey app, you can create polls and surveys to know the majority opinion of the user base. Communities: Be a part of the communities to meet people from all parts of the world with similar interests. You can create a community for schools, alumni, businesses, gaming, etc., Document Scanner: You don’t have to download a separate app for scanning your documents. Get it done with Clap Messenger only. Voice-Video Calling: Put a stop to endless chats! Get on to the voice-video calls of Clap Messenger for clear and crisp interactions. Unread Messages: Forgot to read chats? need not worry! This filter helps you to figure out all the unread messages in just one go. Awards & Accolades: Clap Messenger is one the early super apps of India. India is a Great Market for SaaS Players India has become home to some of the most celebrated global SaaS products. Over the last couple of years, Indian SaaS startups have become quite open to the idea of offering state-of-the-art SaaS solutions. India’s success with top notch SaaS products like , , , and has India emerging as a strong market for SaaS products. Zoho Troop Messenger Time Dynamo Click2Magic Clap Messenger As a result, there are many that have established their footing in recent years. Most of the SaaS products from these companies have been accredited in Indian and global market simultaneously. successful SaaS companies With the remarkable growth in the SaaS industry of India, a number of new products that cater to different niche requirements have also emerged. This explains why the Indian SaaS industry is projected to grow at a competitive rate over the next decade. If you know any SaaS product that can disrupt the market in 2020, let us know in the comments below.

Six Indian SaaS Startups Products To Watch in 2022

10 Best Chat APIs & Messaging SDKs of 2022 (Software Compared, Reviewed and Ranked) 

Cross-platform apps are in high demand in the era of the exploding app development market. As a result, it has become crucial for companies to create applications for several platforms. For creating incredible cross-platform apps for Android, iOS, and the web, developers embrace Flutter. Businesses that engage in the creation of Flutter web apps may build applications that are incredibly scalable and reliable. What is Flutter for the Web? You may create intricate web applications with interactive information that is graphically intensive using the Flutter app development platform. In reality, it gives current Flutter apps a delivery paradigm based on different web browsers. Even Windows apps may be used with it. You can create web apps using Flutter that renders fluidly, much like your iOS or Android apps. In reality, when it comes time to launch the app, you will be able to transform your development project into native code. Nearly as fluid as native applications is Flutter apps. The technology of the device and the web browser, however, both have a major role in efficiency. Why should businesses choose Flutter web app development? Businesses like Flutter web app development because it allows them to construct dynamic designs and fluid animations while also offering a quicker development process and lower development costs. Their ideal option for simultaneously developing a mobile and web app with the same codebase is provided by flutter web app development. Additionally, it provides an amazing user interface and experience that captures the attention of the users. Since it is an affordable method of creating an MVP to present to investors for investments, many firms like Flutter. Last but not least, you can be sure that Flutter for web apps has a promising future with Google's support. You can be sure that Google will release fresh updates and correct the issues. How to build a Web Application for Your Business using Flutter? For projects with limited time and money, the Flutter framework is a great option. When flawless UX and aesthetically pleasing design are your top priorities, you may also utilize Flutter. So, if you're wondering how to create a web application using Flutter, the stages you should think about before you start are listed below. Don't skip these stages if you want to effectively create your web application. Conduct Market Research: To get insightful knowledge about the market environment and rivals, perform thorough market research. This aids in your comprehension of the crucial strategies employed and errors made by your rivals. You may grow from those errors and create a more creative concept and a more effective plan. Learn about Target Audience: Identifying your target market is essential while choosing Flutter web development. You may use it to assist in selecting the characteristics for your minimal viable product (MVP). Knowing what your audience wants will make it simpler to concentrate on what is important and move unimportant things to the backlog. You may also ask consumers for advice and comments to learn what they want. Nothing could stop your web app if your goals were in line with what your users wanted. Prepare Intuitive UI/UX Design: The web design determines how your software appears to people and communicates with them. The features of the app are straightforward to use and appealing to consumers because of this. You can make a great UI/UX design with Flutter. The framework provides customers with a great visual experience by offering color palette options and eye-catching animations. The ideal balance of functionality and aesthetics that Flutter can provide will determine how effective your web app is overall. Choose Flutter App Development Company: The best app development company should be chosen as the second phase in the Flutter web app creation process. The business must have a big impact on how user-friendly, logical, and visually beautiful your web app is. To give the finest customer service, it's critical that the business you select has solid experience producing good app designs. The Flutter app must be designed by web app developers so that the user may do all of its intended tasks without assistance. Build MVP: Before releasing your Flutter app to the public, it is essential to test it on the intended platforms. The MVP of your app is the one that has solely the most important features. It will help you determine whether or not your app will be successful. Hire a reputable Flutter app development company that can help you through the full process for a successful MVP development. Test your Application: It's crucial to maintain testing your web apps while using Flutter. Depending on the features and functions of your web app, you may use the following methods: - This type of testing is carried out to evaluate a number of software elements that consumers will interact with. ✔  UI/UX Testing - In this kind of web app testing, every change made to the website is examined to determine whether it disrupts the way the website functions as a whole. ✔ Regression Testing - It is a kind of black-box testing that aids in determining whether a web application complies with the required specifications. ✔ Functionality Testing Your Flutter web app's proper testing can help you find faults and problems, save on expenses and time associated with app development, and dramatically enhance your standing as a service provider. Hosting Your App: You must choose a server when you have fully tested the Flutter web application. You must install an SSL certificate and register a domain name. Choose a cloud service provider after that, such as Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. You'll probably receive what you require if you select one of these hosting options. You are prepared to go live once you have the host and the code. Your consumers can easily utilize your app when you upload it to the hosting service. But it's not the end yet. After your web app has been successfully launched, be careful to monitor Flutter web performance using different in-app analytics tools, respond to users' inquiries and complaints, and roll out updates to boost user engagement. Final Thoughts MultiQoS is a flutter app development company with experience in generating Flutter web apps if you're looking to design a unique web application using Flutter. In reality, we have a wealth of expertise in developing web apps for Flutter. To design market-leading web apps that can help you reach your business objectives, you may engage . Flutter app developers Flutter might be the best approach to digital transformation and mobile app development. Additionally, we go above and above to provide our clients with specialized Flutter web app development services to ensure their entire pleasure. This has helped us develop a broad client base with hundreds of clients from several industrial sectors.

How to Build a Flutter Web Application in 2022

Hi Aharon, welcome to our series “Behind the Startup.” Please tell us about yourself and the story behind ? Ishan Pandey: AutoLeadStar Thank you! I am excited to be here. Aharon Horwitz: was co-founded in Jerusalem by myself, Eliav Moshe, and Yishai Goldstein. We became friends in the military and university and connected years later over a shared passion about empowering small businesses to win at modern marketing and stay relevant against the monopolizing forces sweeping modern capitalism. We got going in the broad category for small and medium enterprises until, in 2016, an advisor angel of ours suggested we look at the automotive industry. This was 2016 going into 2017. We dove in and never looked back, today offering a powerful platform to car retailers that uses AI to understand shoppers and dealer inventory and help dealers market and sell online the way they would in a showroom. AutoLeadStar Every year, cars with new features are launched by companies that wish to keep their market competitiveness alive and thriving. What role does digital marketing play in aligning the buyer’s wishes to the automotive company’s goals? Ishan Pandey: So much is dependent on the vehicle and car maker. A bad run of models, either lack of shopper interest or quality manufacturing issues, absolutely kills a brand and can set it back for four, five years or longer. The opposite is true too. So a big part has to do with the manufacturer. But the retailers play a massive role in guiding shoppers to the features that they need and want. Aharon Horwitz: The best salespeople at car dealers today are not pushy or aggressive; they are entirely consultative and supportive. Many dealers are moving to one-price models to remove all the haggling and complexity from what’s inherently a complicated process. We think that digital marketing has to be like this. First, it should be super specific to the shopper interest. No billboards on the internet. Second, it should be fully scaled on all the offerings and features available in the inventory so it can find the right matches. This should be updated and optimized around the clock to meet shoppers when and where they want it. Can you explain how automated marketing strategies work and why content marketing strategy plays a key role in attracting the desired customer base? Ishan Pandey: Great question. Google and Facebook today are not the Google and Facebook of five years ago. When dealing with a huge amount of inventory and first-party data, there’s practically no way for a manual-oriented marketer to max out the opportunities these platforms provide truly. An automated platform that can sync with the niche market is entirely necessary. Content has to be useful, but it’s much more important to test and optimise continually than designing the perfect ad or website CTA. Having learning built into automation is the key to success. Aharon Horwitz: How exactly has digital marketing remodelled the automotive industry and what has been the most significant shift in terms of it becoming a trendsetter for innovation? Ishan Pandey: This is a fascinating little history. Car dealers are the inheritors of the previous modes of mass transportation, including carriages dealerships and bike shops. Inherently these were family-owned community businesses, passed down through the generations, and employing locals. Dealers were known hubs and destinations in towns across the US and really beyond. Aharon Horwitz: When the internet emerged, dealers began to get disintermediated from their customers. In the early days, they started to build their own rudimentary websites and online catalogues, but quite soon along came classified websites that became mass aggregators of vehicles. As shopping shifted online suddenly, dealers were no longer community rooted brands, and they came to be seen as merely a price, a phone number, and email address. This started to change around 2015 when dealers started to regain their direct to customer brand and marketing channels. I’d bet spend on aggregator sites has dropped since, and spend on direct has gone up. The reasons for this change came from dealers understanding what digital mastery and maturity look like; the rise of pure-play digital dealers like Carvana, Shift and Vroom spurred this on as well. What technology stack is deployed by AutoLeadStar to increase the sales of vehicles? Ishan Pandey: AutoLeadStar knows how to mimic dealer insights into digital, and uses a very powerful engine to find high-quality shoppers on the web, engage them with differentiated personalization on the website, and support the ongoing sale and nurture by activating the dealer’s data through the process. Aharon Horwitz: Technically, we merge a marketing automation platform (think Hubspot or Drift with advertising automation baked in) with commerce enablement tools. The impact is usually a far more significant amount of quality leads for less cost, which is the result of how AutoLeadStar leverages data, optimizes performance, and interacts with the marketing platforms According to you, what policies and practices should digital marketing companies employ to protect consumers against data exploitation, especially in automated ads? Ishan Pandey: Aharon Horwitz: I think the principle of treating people the way you would want to be treated should be the guiding star. We think first-party opt-in data is the best data to market around. We have largely stayed away from 3rd party data and showed dealers that we can heavily bring results that outperform those using 3rd party data. From what I’ve seen in the industry, most dealers are looking for top-tier solutions that follow consumer protection guidelines and best practices. There are bad actors, but we’ve largely seen those as the exception, not the rule. In this age of technological advancement, what do you think will be the future of small, personally owned car dealerships? Ishan Pandey: It’s clear that buying a car is a different sort of purchase than a pair of shoes or a new shirt. There’s a clear value add in a customer-centric operation on the other side of that massive purchase. Therefore, I believe that dealerships should excel in customer service and support and embrace technology wherever it supports that mission. Those that do have a future, though we also see a lot of consolidation around bigger, more corporate and tech-forward groups. Aharon Horwitz: Why do you think automated marketing is necessary for these small businesses? Ishan Pandey: To compete and win business on the internet today, you need a pretty robust and sophisticated strategy. It’s very hard to do this manually. What ends up having is you start working for the tech instead of the tech working for you. It becomes a bottomless pit of frustration and missed opportunity. An automated solution like AutoLeadStar’s does all the work, leverages the data to get results beyond what any human could do, and does it under the dealer marketing leader’s strategic guidance. Aharon Horwitz: In the automotive industry, the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath will cause negative impact and sudden shifts in consumer purchasing behaviour. What are your views on Tesla and the future of the automotive industry? Ishan Pandey: Similar to general retail, we saw in our data that COVID drove a huge spike in digital activity in automotive. However, unlike retail, automotive digital shopping didn’t make up for the loss in foot traffic. It’s simply clear that buying cars purely online isn’t fully baked yet for the mass market. Aharon Horwitz: In this sense, Tesla is an exception that proves a rule and reinforces what’s common in the more traditional retail universe. For example, Tesla makes use of showrooms, test drives, and dealer-like activity. People largely still want to touch, feel, and experience a vehicle before buying. We, therefore, believe dealers need to become “click and brick,” or even better, “click or brick.” Sell, service and support customers in the way they want. In that constellation a physical store can be a big compliment to the digital showroom and order process. Today only about 2% of cars are sold through pure-play digital dealers (Carvana, Tesla). 98% of non-private transactions are on traditional retailers. They are modernizing and aim to be a significant force in the future. As a side note, but incredibly important: it’s those 98%, the traditional car dealers, that employ millions of people across the US with reasonable wages. It’s one of those few strongholds left where you can get a good-paying job without a degree from MIT. I cherish that, and that’s why we’re proud to provide them with powerful technology to thrive in the future. According to you, what new trends are we going to see in digital marketing in the auto industry moving forward? Ishan Pandey: Everything is going to be about customer service. The whole industry is shifting to the philosophies and processes that reflect high-end consumer expectations, and that will be very apparent in the digital infrastructure that dealers build over the next few years. Aharon Horwitz: Thank you! The purpose of this article is to remove informational asymmetry existing today in our digital markets by performing due diligence by asking the right questions and equipping readers with better opinions to make informed decisions. The material does not constitute any investment, financial, or legal advice. Please do your research before investing in any digital assets or tokens, etc. The writer does not have any vested interest in the company.

The Current State of Automotive Marketing with Aharon Horwitz

In my , I discussed the various ways in which one can get ideas for new product features. You are likely to use , Microsoft Excel or a project management tool like , etc. or a product management tool like or or , to maintain a repository of all such ideas. Over time, this list keeps increasing and could run into hundreds. How then do you decide what to work on? Which feature should you work on now and which one later? Which feature will move the needle for you and which feature would be a distraction? And how does all this tie in to your overall product roadmap, and hence, business goals? previous post Google Sheets Asana JIRA Aha RoadMunk ProductPlan In this post, I will cover my strategy for building a product roadmap that is simple and effective. The product roadmap that comes out of this exercise will help you decide the order in which you should tackle the various ideas for new product features. You’ll also see how this product roadmap seamlessly ties in with your business goals so that you continue to add more value to your existing customers, add new customers to your business and maintain your market leadership through your product. In my role at , I maintain this repository of ideas in Google Sheets (the Excel version of Google). Although we use JIRA for project management, I find JIRA to be clunky to record a list of such items and build a product roadmap. Google Sheets is a rudimentary yet simple and effective solution to the problem of building product roadmaps. WebEngage Each idea for a new product feature occupies a single row within this Google Sheet. Therefore, this is how the Google Sheet looks like at first: Step 1: Categorize Each Product Idea On a weekly basis I categorize each idea in the list above into one of the four categories below: : These are ideally smaller tasks that involve solving some problem in a better way such as a UI, UX improvement or a minor functionality change. Working on these optimizations will likely help our existing customers solve something quickly or intuitively. But these optimizations will most likely not help in acquiring new customers. Optimizations : These are brand new features we have to work on that will add value to our existing customers and also help us acquire new customers. New Features Disruptors are also new features with the difference that these features will leapfrog us ahead of the competition and create a lot of buzz around the product in a way that almost everyone wants to use our product. You are likely to have only a few such disruptive ideas in your list above. Disruptors: : Distractions are ideas that should not be considered because they are likely to not benefit the existing customers in any meaningful manner, nor will they help acquire new customers. Distractions The idea behind this categorization is to ensure that, once the prioritization is done, we should see that we’re working on a healthy mix of features across categories at any point in time. For example, in any quarter, we should be working on If we were to work only on and ignore completely, it will likely lead to product debt and unhappy customers in a few months time. at least 1 Disruptor, 3 New Features and 20 to 30 Optimizations. Disruptors Optimizations The Google Sheets above with an added column for now looks like this: Category Before we start with the next step, make sure you’ve ignored all the ideas you had categorized as Distractions. Step 2: Specify a Theme for Each Product Idea Although I’ve put this as Step 2, I tend to do this step in tandem with Step 1. Each of your product ideas above fits into a theme. A theme can comprise multiple product ideas. Theme is a broad word that describes the problem it solves for your customer and moves a business metric for you. As an example, any of the items below could be a theme relevant to your product: Build a great onboarding experience Make the product faster Add more integrations Improve overall UX Enterprise features Improve analytics offering Whenever we’re building a product roadmap, it’s easier to select themes than individual product ideas. It’s easier to discuss a theme and say , rather than discuss features and say or . Notice the difference in the language between themes and features. Theme addresses the problem it solves for your customers and is easily understood by anyone. Also notice how each of the themes above is tightly coupled with one or more of your business metrics. We’ll build a great onboarding experience and we’ll also make the product faster We’ll move our technology from Adobe Flash to Web RTC We’ll reduce the steps to integrate for a new user Therefore, let’s now add a theme to each of our ideas in the list: Step 3: Select Your Themes for the Quarter Your business objectives differ from quarter to quarter. Therefore, what you work on in the product will also differ from quarter to quarter. This then means that you have to choose a few themes to work on in a quarter based on your business objectives for that quarter. Remember that each of the themes is tightly knit with a business objective. If the business prerogative for a particular quarter is to acquire new customers with minimal marketing spend, perhaps the Product team should work on the theme in that quarter. This will ensure that the people who are already interested in your product (and therefore, have signed up) are also sold on the product because you’re delivering the to them quickly where they understand the value of the product. Build a great onboarding experience Aha experience If you’re creating a quarterly roadmap, figure out the themes you want to work on in that quarter. Once you’ve done so, proceed with Steps 4 and 5 below for only those ideas that belong to your chosen themes. Step 4: Score Product Ideas on Urgency, Impact, Effort Pick only the themes that are relevant for you for that quarter and score each of the ideas in the chosen themes. This score will tell us the exact order in which we should tackle the various ideas. I conduct this scoring exercise jointly with the founders and the engineering/success leads on a weekly basis where we score each of the ideas above on three parameters — and . Urgency, Impact Effort Urgency How urgent is the feature/idea for your customers (existing as well as potential)? Is the idea effective but not so urgent? Or is the idea effective and very urgent? Please don’t confuse urgency with the impact that the idea can possibly have. Perhaps an such as a small UX change that will take you less than two hours to implement is urgent as the current UX is broken that is leading to unhappy customers. Perhaps one idea is more urgent than the other ideas based on your view of the market and what customers want. Optimization Disruptor Disruptor We score each of the ideas above on a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being most urgent and 1 being least urgent. Impact What’s the expected impact of your idea on your customers (existing as well as potential) and on your competitive position in the market? Will the impact be so great that the new feature will help you acquire new customers? Will the impact be significant enough that your existing customers will use your product more and perhaps even upgrade their subscription? Will the impact help you move ahead of the competitors and achieve/maintain market leadership? We score each of the ideas above on a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being most impactful and 1 being least impactful. Effort How much development effort do you think the feature will require? Is it something that can be implemented within a day or will it require a few weeks or months of effort? We score each of the ideas above on a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 indicating a lot of effort (a month or more) and 1 being least effort (a few hours). Please note that this effort estimate is not based on any thorough technical research and is just an estimate based on the CTO’s and engineering lead’s past experience with the team. At the end of this step, the list above looks like this: Step 5: Calculate the Total Score for Each Product Idea Based on the three parameters above — and we calculate the total score for each of the product ideas in the chosen themes as per the formula below: Urgency, Impact Effort, Total Score = 100 x Urgency + 10 x Impact — 1 x Effort We provide these exact weights to , and because we should always first work on ideas are the most urgent, the most impactful and that will take the least effort to implement. Or in simple terms, we should first work on ideas that are the . This will ensure that we create a strong impact through quick and easy wins. Urgency (100) Impact (10) Effort (1) lowest-hanging fruits As you can see in the chart above, we should always work on the items before we work on the rest of the items. Among all the items, we should work on the ones with before we tackle the rest. High Impact, Low Effort High Impact, Low Effort High Urgency Needless to say, we ignore the items as they would be an unnecessary time sink with little to no impact. Low Impact, High Effort Once we’ve calculated the score for each of the ideas, we then sort the list by the descending order of the We will now see a prioritized list of items that we need to tackle in this exact order. Please remember that this prioritized list of ideas are only for those ideas that belong to the themes we had chosen for the quarter. Total Score. Also, please note that in this exercise, we have not discriminated amongst ideas based on their category — and We have not prioritized or over In any quarter, you should ensure that you’re working on an optimal mix of ideas across various categories. Optimizations, New Features Disruptors. New Features Disruptors Optimizations. At the end of this step, our list above looks like this: We now have a product roadmap for the quarter with our chosen themes and an exact prioritized order in which we should work on each of the ideas that belong to those themes! By following this simple process, we’ve been able to easily build a quarterly product roadmap that’s tied very closely with our quarterly business objectives. You could extrapolate this same exercise to build a monthly product roadmap or even an annual product roadmap. It is however important to note that the product roadmap that comes out of this process is not rigid. From time to time, you might find yourself adding ad hoc tasks to your roadmap that do not fit into any of the chosen themes. This is fine as long one doesn’t overdo it as overdoing it can lead to dilution in product focus. Secondly, the roadmap created through this process is a living document that is always evolving based on the business priorities and objectives. You should visit this roadmap on a monthly basis or more to adjust the themes, and the urgency, impact and effort, if required.

How to Build a Product Roadmap

You can read Part 1 of the SaaS Growth Series here . So you spent many weeks or months in building your SaaS product. How do you then go about building traction for your product? How do you get your first 100 paying customers? In this post, I will cover what I have learnt about building traction for SaaS products. In order to make the post more relevant, I am going to make some broad assumptions. I assume that the product being built is for the SMB market (self-service sales) and not enterprises (where you need a sales team to pitch the product). I also assume that you have done enough customer development throughout your initial build stage such that you have built a product that the market really wants ( , if you will). This would involve working fairly regularly with a set of 5 or 10 customers or potential customers throughout your build stage — researching and validating the idea before you start building, regular feedback on what you’ve built etc. Product-Market Fit Once your basic product is in place, you then start building traction. Traction for SaaS startups can be defined in many ways — some define it as getting to $1 Million in ARR, some define it as getting your first 100 paying customers, some define it as getting 1,000 free or paying customers to use your product etc. I define traction as getting your first 100 paying customers. These are customers who have not worked with you during the build stage. These are customers who have perhaps never even heard of you. non-affiliated Channels to Acquire Non-Affiliated Customers The foundation of all customer acquisition is built on identifying the customers, targeting them and then acquiring them. Let’s now explore the channels you can use to acquire these 100 non-affiliated paying customers. right Personal Contacts If you can depend on your personal network to get your first 100 customers, you can ignore the rest of this post. On a serious note, if you can actually depend on your personal contacts or contacts of your personal contacts to get your first 100 customers, your job of building traction just became easier. Some of the popular folks in the SaaS domain (eg. ) have such a massive following that building traction for any new product they make becomes very easy. Hiten Shah You could also attend industry conferences to personally invite potential customers to use your product. Remember, the point here is to get to your first 100 customers. So even reaching out to people on Twitter who have in the past tweeted about a problem that is directly or indirectly related to the space your product is in, just might help in getting those first set of customers. PR / Communities / Bloggers/ Influencers / Directory Listings I have put a lot of things under this all encompassing category of PR. Anything that can help you build awareness through publicity comes under this category. This could involve introducing your product on (and there’s a complete process on how to do this right — , and ), , , or any such online community, blog etc. Another way in which you can identify these online communities or blogs is by checking out the acquisition sources of your competitors on and targeting those sources. You should also list your product on the software directly lists such as , etc. Product Hunt here here here Hacker News TechCrunch VentureBeat SimilarWeb Capterra G2 Crowd Also included in this channel is the coverage you can get from influencers. Influencers are a much abused channel in B2C startups. However, the dividends could be significantly high for SaaS products if influential people can start talking about your product. When launched their product, known folks in the front-end engineering domain such as , and used the product, loved it and tweeted about it of their own volition. There could not have been a better way for to acquire its first set of customers. BrowserStack John Resig Chris Coyier Paul Irish BrowserStack Content and SEO Generating content and optimizing for SEO is a gradual long-term strategy that provides massive benefits but only after sustained efforts over a period of time. To optimize the time it takes to reap the benefits of SEO, you could start building content (blog articles) while you’re building your product so that SEO can start delivering as soon as you are ready to launch your product. Please note that you have to be smart about the kind of content you create. To figure out the content you should be creating, go on to see the keywords people search for, pay attention to the suggested or related keywords on Google, or go on to see the keywords that your competitors rank highly for and build content accordingly. Google Ads SimilarWeb If you are able to attract visitors based on your content, you should be asking them for their email addresses so that you have a solid list of potential customers even before your launch! Paid Ads If you have funding, you could explore the domain of paid advertisements. Perhaps your findings on keywords for could be used here. However, you could end up burning money on dozens of keywords to eventually find a set of keywords that work for you. Content and SEO Business Development and Sales This is applicable if you’re selling to enterprises where your ACV (Annual Contract Value) is large (anywhere upwards of $20,000 per year). Also, with such large ACVs, traction could even mean getting your first 10 paying customers who use your product extensively. If you’re selling to enterprises, you would likely need some sort of an inside sales team that can go sell for you. Of course, in the initial stages where you’re trying to get your first few customers, it is mostly the founder who would do the selling before you hire sales folks. Partnerships Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could ride on the coattails of a bigger, much popular product? It is difficult to establish mutually beneficial partnerships for a startup launching its first product. However, if done right, it could be a great way to acquire new customers. Microsoft publicized both and on their page a few years ago as simpler website testing alternatives to downloading VM (virtual machine) software from the Microsoft website to test how your website rendered on the IE browser. The process of downloading and using VMs was complicated and time consuming. Therefore, Microsoft developed a lot of goodwill with the software developers for introducing them to these easier website testing alternatives. Additionally, and ended up acquiring hundreds and thousands of customers who had a genuine need for the product through this partnership with Microsoft. SauceLabs BrowserStack Developers SauceLabs BrowserStack Virality / Word of Mouth If you have a great product, hopefully people will talk about it with their friends and colleagues. went from 0 to double digit million $ revenues purely on the basis of word of mouth. People tried the product, loved it and went and evangelized it to their networks. BrowserStack Or you could put mechanisms in the product to make it go viral. gave you more space if you got your friends to sign up. When launched their first website notification product, you could see WebEngage’s logo and a link back to WebEngage on all notifications being used by free users of the product. This built great virality into the product. Similarly, when you use to submit a form or to take a survey, you will notice that both these products prompt you to create your own form or your own survey once you’ve submitted the original form or survey. This then creates tremendous virality into the product that can help you acquire new users fairly quickly. Dropbox WebEngage Typeform SurveyMonkey Onboarding Experience Even if you are able to harness your channels of acquisition to acquire users, your efforts will not yield results unless you have a great product onboarding experience. New users should be able to perceive the value that your product provides to them quickly. The faster the users get to the proverbial with your product, the faster they will convert into paying customers. does this beautifully where hundreds of browsers and devices are available to you to test your app or website on as soon as you sign-up. Getting to the with BrowserStack literally takes less than 10 seconds. Aha moment BrowserStack Aha moment BrowserStack Onboarding Experience Almost all great companies I can think of such as , , , etc. have invested many hours in building that great onboarding experience from the start. In fact, in some ways your onboarding starts even before the user actually signs up. If you don’t have a convincing message on your homepage or if you’re not able to convey the value your product provides or the problem it addresses, chances are that the majority of your visitors will not even sign up on your website. Mailchimp Dropbox Asana Zendesk Metrics to Track Assuming you have been able to generate enough traction and your onboarding experience is great, how do you quantitatively track whether your initial customers are actually able to derive value from your product over a period of time. The behavior of your initial customers could portend success in the longer term with a much larger customer base. Following are some of the key metrics you should track and analyze on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to infer whether your initial customers are actually able to derive value from your product. : If your product is being used 3 or more unique days in a week over a sustained period of time, you know that there is some value that your product provides to the users that is driving such behavior Unique Days of Usage : The more your users spend time on your product on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, the higher the value the product provides to them Total Time of Usage : I define activation rate as the ratio of users who signed up and used your product to the total users who signed up. The extensive usage can be defined in many ways. At , we developed a formula that would score the user’s engagement in the first few days after registration. Certain parameters like usage of certain features or testing on multiple devices resulted in a higher score representing a more engaged user. The objective was to identify the cut-off score where you then invest efforts in increasing the activation rate of those users whose engagement was below the cut-off scores Activation Rate extensively BrowserStack : If you have a product like or that caters to teams, you should track whether users have invited their team members to the account and also the activation rates of each of the members in the team. If the activation rate for the team members is low, then there should be mechanisms built into the product through which you can increase the adoption rate of the product within teams Adoption Rate Asana Front : If majority of your users are canceling their subscription or are not using the product even after activation, then you should question whether your product has even reached the PMF stage Churn Rate Closing Notes While you might invest your efforts in multiple channels of acquisition, you would generally find that only one or two channels of acquisition tend to give you the most returns. The faster your process of identifying these key channels of acquisition, the faster you will be able to acquire your first 100 non-affiliated paying customers. Lastly, regardless of the channels of acquisition, if you’re targeting self-service sales (i.e SMB customers), you should expend enough efforts in onboarding. The key to building great products that leave a lasting impression on the customers almost always begins with a great onboarding experience! You can read Part 1 of the SaaS Growth Series . here

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