Ask IH: What's wrong with my survey SaaS?
TinySurveys | Tiny surveys, huge results!
For reasons that are a whole other post of their own, about a year ago I spent a week and built https://tinysurveys.io I launched it as a private beta and had good engagement, feedback, etc. After launching it as a paid service, I receive a handful of sign ups a month, but no paid users and nobody responding to any emails I send.
I haven't touched it in over a year, done no marketing, etc but still get a handful of sign ups per month. Those new sign ups usually fiddle around but never send out a survey. I have a few hunches on why, but since nobody will respond I can't confirm them.
I personally find the service super useful. I used it on a couple SaaS betas back after I launched it (that was the reason for creating it actually) and the engagement rates were much higher than any other emails or surveys I sent.
I've been contemplating updating the landing page, putting it back into a private beta mode and submitting to beta sites to see if I can get a new round of beta users to actually give feedback. I'm just not sure if it's worth the effort or if there's some glaring problem with it that I'm overlooking.
I'd love to hear from the IH community on their thoughts both on the service as it stands as well as suggestions on what I should do with it.
Here is few things:
-Change copyright date from 2016 to 2018 - this is an indicator if service is still active
-Your footer is badly designed, it should stick to the bottom - check your divs.
-you are not using AdminLTE CSS when you could. Whole form making elements look basic and indicate this is an MVP - not a good sign if you want to host survey for longer. Have fun with AdminLTE awesome designs!
-you could use Ajax - refreshing the form is not to user-friendly anymore for such a service
-only ONE QUESTION allowed per survey? Then only ONE follow up question to the answer given possible? No option to add more questions than one, no option to add more follow up questions than one per answer - this is probably the moment when I would bounce off and look for another website.
Also, only 50 answers allowed for a free account? Allow one survey and unlimited answers, not 50. What happens if I reach 50 and not pay? Will users be blocked from answering questions? No customer will try to find answers to those questions.
Thanks for the comments. I seem to recall having read somewhere some time ago that you weren't supposed to update your copyright, but I'll have to check on that again. It does make sense as you say that it looks unmaintained.
Do you think this service should allow people to actually send the surveys in addition to using 3rd party services? That is one part that I was personally thinking people might get hung up on but I'm not sure.
It definitely needs some design help, so that is something on my radar. I hadn't even remembered I used AdminLTE, so I'm sure I could fix a lot up there.
The thing with the single main question is mostly due to the email delivery. That can only be a single question because it's a link in the email, so clicking it takes you to the thank you / follow up question page. That could seem confusing if you aren't fully aware of how the service works.
That said, my co-founder (wife) and I had some disagreements about how many follow up questions should be allowed. I'm kind of all for letting the survey creator shoot themselves in the foot with a million follow up questions if they want to but got overruled...
For a re-launch, however, it will definitely allow more questions.
I agree that the free plan should not limit on answers. In looking at the plans, assuming a monthly fee even makes sense for this kind of service (which I think it does for some people and not for others) that the main differentiator should probably be the number of surveys you can have at a time.
Thanks again for looking at it and providing feedback, it's much appreciated!
I think you are focusing too much on email part.
You have mentioned that adding more questions would be bad - but maybe add this option for few days and see how people react to that? I assume you still get some new signups, so you can easily validate ANY idea quickly. You are in nadvantage here over most of other unreleased SAAS startups!
But if you want to stuck with it, then allow adding follow-up questions SAME for all answers, or at least one-click copying. Now it takes to many clicks to have the same follow up on all questions. Make design easier and more intuitive.
Perhaps that's part of the problem, maybe the landing page (which I know needs redone) isn't clear enough on the fact that these are email first/only surveys. That's part of why they had a 2-3x boost in survey responses over other methods, that the main question can be answered just by hitting a link in an email and the user was done if they didn't want to do a follow-up question.
So really, if I'm not focusing on the email part then I might as well scrap it because you'd be just as well off using surveymonkey or any of the other dozens of survey platforms :)
To the contrary. You are working on the GLOBAL market. There is tone of people that will go with the "little guy", not the survey monkey.
You can also find a niche - I think your niche is fine, it's just that I think you never got in to the user perspective and you have not profiled your perspective users well enough.
I assume your customer would be people trying to get feedback through email. What kind of feedback? Possibly why their users do not use the product or why they are abandoning the product? There is a huge market in the "why my users are not using my products?!". Use your idea to solve your own problems. Market it as a way for customers to find out why people are not using their products. Then have email surveys with an option "do you mind answering few more questions?" with a link to the web version of a survey.
Once again - solve your own problems on your own tool, this way you will solve potential customer problems and you will validate your idea.