A Free B2B SaaS Idea

Hi,

I'm a product manager at a big tech company. While working here, I'v noticed lots of different problems/opportunities that I think would make for great b2b startups.

Wanted to share one of these ideas with everyone. I've taken a problem-first approach to explaining this idea. I think it's really important to deeply understand the problem your are solving before you start building anything.

Problem: Managing user feedback

One of the best ways to get b2b product ideas is to look for situations where people are still using docs and spreadsheets to manage a business process. I like to call this the "spreadsheet test".

Managing user feedback is a great example of this. Product managers and UX researchers are always trying to understand their user and customer needs. To do this, we run focus groups, customer interviews, do usability testing etc.

What happens next? The notes from each session are created and stored in docs, drive folders spreadsheets or maybe even in Trello. The next job is to try to develop product insights from this information so that we can make more informed decisions on what features to build next. This process is incredibly time-consuming, inefficient and tedious. You have to analyse all of the different docs and try to identify common trends and patterns. Each hour of research can often result in 2 hours of analysis.

The Opportunity

Make it far easier for product teams to collect, manage and analyze user feedback.

There are a number of products that perform a similar job already such as https://uservoice.com/ and https://www.pendo.io/. However, they are mainly focused on allowing you to easily capture, maintain and rank individual pieces of feedback from users. They do not work well for managing detailed feedback from customer interviews and usability studies.

The Unique Selling Point

Build a product that allows you to generate product insights from detailed user feedback. Not just a product that allows you to collect and categorize individual pieces of feedback.

You need to help product teams understand which user problems they should be solving next. You need to help them generate signal from the noise.

MVP

So, what could you launch to get a foothold in this market?

There are 3 areas where you could focus on creating value:

Capturing user feedback
Managing/maintaining user feedback
Analysing user feedback

For an MVP, I would focus on helping product teams to easily capture user feedback in a structured way. this will make the job of analysing the user feedback down the line far easier. To do this, you could build a tool that standardises the different information being recorded at each user/customer session. So that product teams can then compare like with like when looking at all of the different customer interviews.

The simplest version of this would be a form tool where product teams can set up different form fields which they record information on and compare each form field across each user interview.

Basic requirements might look like this:

PMs can create a form to which free text fields can be added
These freetext fields can have different titles
During user interviews, PMs can record information into each form field.
After a round of interviews, product teams can analyze the information recorded on each form field to make better product decisions.

For example, a product team might create a form with the following fields:

Question 1:
Question 2:
Question 3:
Key Insights:
Key Pain Points:
Interesting Quotes:

After a round of user interviews, it would then be very easily to compare answers to the "Key Pain Points" questions and start generating insights.

Is it too simple?

Of course this MVP idea is nothing groundbreaking. It is essentially a feature poor form-builder. But it would be easy to build and with the right branding would allow you get acquire some initial customers and build from there. Your main goal then is to build a cohesive solution that allows product teams to collect manage and most importantly, generate insights from user feedback.

Did you like this post? If yes, please let me know in the comments. I've got lots of other ideas and would be happy to continue sharing them. But want to make sure that people find them valuable first :)