What `feature` would convince you to out-source your team page?
Hey IH community,
My existing side-project started with still being listed as CTO at a company I left almost a year ago now!
Anyway, I know why I'm still listed CTO, because its a static page, so development tickets need to be made, prioritised, in the sprint, etc. Easier to focus on other stuff.
Next to that, there is almost no website without a team page. How many development hours is spend on cropping team photos/year?
So here comes https://teampa.ge - similar to Algolia (autocomplete), Statuspage (status page), Typeform (forms), Homerun (job openings) - to out source your team page.
But, my question is not, will you use it, but what feature would convince you to migrate to Teampage?
Are you sure you're asking the right people?
Solo founders/two person teams don't really have a problem with this right? Certainly not one they'd pay 200 euros a year for.
Someone who controls an HR budget on the other hand is probably the person you need to ask if this is something that keeps them up at night. Maybe in a very large corporate environment where those roles are pretty stable this might not be an issue either... but perhaps in smallish size organizations where they have every member of a 10 ~ 20 person team listed on the team page could be the sweet spot. Just a theory. Though it will be the person who controls whatever budget that would go under (whether its HR or engineering) that will decide yes or no and would spending the money make them look good or bad to their boss?
Also its probably important to consider the 'point of market entry'. When does the customer need this product? My theory would be they are probably only interested in it if they are currently hiring and know they need to change/update that damn page again OR they have just had to file a ticket and spend time doing the work because someone has just left. Outside of those times Its my gut feeling this would be out of sight out of mind. So... since every company with a team page is a potential lead (though you actually want to nail down which customer segment and try to laser target it first)... can you set up a script that monitors there team page for changes and then engage them in a sales effort when they make a change OR when they have job openings posted for roles that will likely require a team page change? Just a thought.
I was thinking the right people to answer would be: (ex-)product people operating in a small dev team or non-technical startup founders. IH has those :)
I agree HR actually would also make sense to pitch to, but then the company would already be larger (and have the resources?).
I like your thinking on acquiring customer at the right point in time. And tracking Linkedin job changes might be a fun flow:
It's still very new for me; and maybe indeed finding the right 'customer' and 'timing' is more important then the right feature. Thanks!
I think this has been a very productive discussion. Haha. Glad I could help. All the best!
Here's how I imagine it by company size:
A few people: no budget, will code it themselves, roster doesn't change much at all, if ever. If the company is only a handful of people, you don't want a team page because it shows you're too small to be a "safe" business partner.
~20 people: roster doesn't change frequently enough to warrant attention and products. Dev will update it once in a long while.
100-person company: company doesn't care about the team page. It exists and shows smiling faces. The only pain points are that one or two particular devs keep getting tickets to add people and they'll probably ignore these tickets as much as possible. The strongest incentive I can think of is that not putting new faces on the team page affects morale for new hires.
1000 employees and up: There's no team page.
That's my generalization of company sizes. Maybe if you find exceptions to these attitudes, you'll find customers.
Here's a sad thought, unfortunately: You're offering a CMS for the least dynamic content.
Wow, I hadn't even thought of looking at it like this. I've approached it like company roles (HR, PM, founder), but not company types. It might actually make sense to get a sit down with somebody in every size company and understand where there might be opporuntities.
E.g. in a 1000 employee company you say a team page doesn't make much sense (or does it: https://www.cloudflare.com/people/ ?) but maybe the non-existing team page should feature 'employees of the month' (for moral?), or only the 'support' or 'sales' people and their contact details (for sales).
Can I steal the "You're offering a CMS for the least dynamic content." and put it on one of my landing pages? Lets see how that joke performs in CTR :)
Of course you can steal it! I'm not a copywriter by trade, so I don't care about that.
Cloudflares' team page is definitely an exception for a company that big. I'd chase them on LinkedIn, Meetup, Facebook, etc, and try to talk to them as much as possible. They could use your product.
@csallen question; why does Indiehackers, or even Stripe not have a team page?
Hmmm, I can't tell you why Stripe doesn't have one, as I don't know. IH doesn't have one because I've never felt the benefits were worth the costs. Essentially, the costs are the time to make the page, which I could be spending doing other things, and the UI space to link to it somewhere in the footer. The benefits are hard to enumerate, especially since we already have an about page that explains more than enough. I think a team page would only be incrementally useful on top of that.
Apt analogy. This is the main reason why i don't really see much point. In the past, we had this issue of basically creating this team page and give the ease of maintaining to HRs (People Management) but then this was never the top priority. In fact this was very well the last priority.
Honestly I don’t see why anyone would pay for this. Certainly not as a subscription
That comment is not really helpful in arguments or point of view.
I think internally facing staff directories for medium-large business are potentially a better market.
This makes more sense I think. A company may find it important to be able to navigate the org chart
A company rarely needs to communicate its org chart externally
Do you know any software in this space?
You are trying to create a CMS for a boring part of the website into a ... Still boring part of the website. If I was you I would go nuts, like "let the employee creates their register", or "internally, the team page could be used as group chat", or "internally an employee could schedulle a party or change a photo to another team member".
I can see that it is relatively boring, but that should make sales easier compared to something 'unknown' no?
Yes, I think you are right. I was thinking on a startup where one would be excited about long-term, bigger vision, but as an indie side-project, your way of thinking is a much better fit (although I think that the tag price is a little too high). I think I drank the Kool-Aid this time :)
This product isn't relevant to my needs but maybe I can offer some points of discussion because the business idea seems interesting.
Your project reminds me of what another IHers said some weeks ago, that he often had to go to LinkedIn to figure out what his co-workers were really doing because they had no system for that. Maybe the value of your app isn't just a public facing team page, but an tool for co-worker discovery? Maybe it could be a future pivot...
I was somewhat underwhelmed by your own team page and the demo. I was expecting them to showcase more of the features and design you offer.
As someone who often works with code and embedding various 3rd party code, it bothers me that code snippets:
lack total customization. Seamless doesn't mean anything anymore, so just give me total HTML/CSS control.
don't have sane caching headers. Even Google sucks at this.
embedding the code has a noticeable performance hit. Please don't ruin the performance work I've done.
Amin, thanks!
co-worker discovery <-- interesting thought. It would be a big pivot, but one worth exploring!
Yes I see the demo and team page is underwhelming, and I should fix that asap, given the irony...
Maybe fun for you to know that there is a solution for javascript embed codes. That view-source: https://teampa.ge/demo page uses Cloudflare Workers, and hence replaces the javascript embed, with actual HTML + CSS at the CDN edge (and pulls in the team from the teampage API). See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVFZN8ZQiiQ
And last point, the teampage admin allows for two HTML templates and a CSS field for total control.
Where is the demo team page? Would be nice if it was the first thing one can see.
Also - https://teampa.ge/team This page needs improvement.
Yes, that page you link to is what I would call irony ;)
The demo team page is at: https://teampa.ge/demo. The homepage has a "demo team" button, but from your comment I understand that is unclear.
Also, design is uber important for your product. At 450px width, your homepage is broken!
Yes, between 420px and 550px it sucks. What device is that?
Macbook, 15", OSX, Chrome.
:)