Hello IH! I’ve recently completed an MVP for my first SaaS project. I’m hoping to get some advice on how you all might approach a product like this.
The Product
https://www.qalm.io is a tool for companies to execute “Ask Me Anything” style Q&A sessions internally. AMAs were pioneered with great success on Reddit, and the concept has started making its way to the business world.
(Edit: To test it out, enter #TL7CCN in the access code box, and press 'JOIN')
The company I work for full time started doing these for a variety of situations, and I found them to be an awesome way of engaging our employees from all walks of the company.
Some examples:
While it sounds easy to execute something like this, the truth is that it does require a proper tool. It can be patched together on something like Slack or Google Forms, but these methods won't contain a lot of functionality that I thought were essential, such as anonymous questions, user voting, full session visibility, analytics, etc.
How to Get Early Users?
I’ve started creating some content around internal communication topics on https://blog.qalm.io and I’m happy to continue pursuing that avenue, but I wanted to try to course correct early, if I need to. Additionally, I’d like to take some more active approaches to pursuing potential customers.
Any thoughts or advice on how you might approach this? Thanks everyone in advance!
EDIT:
I figured it might help to see it in action as well, so you can use this code from the home page to access an event I just created:
#TL7CCN
Hey this is pretty damn cool! As per a comment here it's definitely an enterprise tool and that generally means getting hands on. Especially early days you're going to need to network and work out how to get to the right people.
You're wanting to find the people and organisations who are focused on employee engagement. Find out what events are on around internal communications and employee engagement. You may even find that some organisations have created a role to manage employee engagement.
Look for events around Great Places to work and Glassdoor. Perhaps find organisations near you that are a GPTW or very carefully watch and manage their Glassdoor profile (they will be responding to feedback - you'll probably even get the title of the person - correlate with linkedin then bam you've got your target!). These are the ones that will be focused on having a connection between executives and employees.
Do you have any existing early customers/users?
Awesome suggestion! I hopped onto Glassdoor and was immediately able to identify a couple of potential leads by referencing companies on 'Great Places to Work' lists, and finding active users within Glassdoor reviews sections.
At the moment, I'm still looking for my first users. I really want to take a customer-focused approach to the product direction, so I've been holding off on building enhancement features until I can validate them.
I completely understand that! It's so hard to stop development when you've probably got 1000s of ideas on where the road map goes.
Glad the suggestion helped, I hope you get your first customers! I'm pretty passionate about employee engagement and culture so I get it and I love the idea.
I would try to pick a department that could really use it the most to get yourself a beachhead. At my old company, the office manager and HR manager/head of Ops would be responsible for rolling something like this out. With the heated HR environment at the moment, I would try to target those set of folks and really cater the Q&A to how people can interface with them to get help. Then I would try to get the next department on board (after the rest of the ops team), again at my previous company the more likely team to do this would be marketing.
Once you cross a path between these two departments you should have something pretty good taking hold of the company. I would then try to have them target the CEO/VP's since they face the problem of repeating the company vision and making sure there's clarity amongst teams. With so much adoption at the bottom this should be much easier to sell at this point, then the CEO/VP's should be encouraged to make a company wide mandate as to how the company should add this to their entire workflow/process. It's hard to say if my previous company would have adopted this though because we were using wiki's for many things beyond just this, so you still run into that 10x product problem where this needs to be so good it's either complimentary or replaces that knowledge base (which is super hard due to how much the base contains). Because of this, it may even be a better strategy to target them before they have wiki's and that whole process setup. Also it may be better to purely focus on the Ops department with the added benefit of other departments eventually adopting it (but it wouldn't be your focus as an indiehacker)
I'd probably focus a lot of energy on calling/emailing and creating content for 20-50 employee type company office manager / HR / ops teams. I think your biggest struggle will be around their existing monolith solutions and people willing to take a chance to uproot their current processes and move everyone to understanding yours. Content around why your service over a collection of google docs/slides or wiki's would be very helpful here.
Thanks for the feedback! I agree that overcoming existing solutions will be a challenge, as there are certainly other ways to accomplish something like this, and while they aren't designed for it, and (at least in many cases) won't work quite as well, it's easy to fall into the "well we'll just do it this way" mindset.
Good point about targeting certain groups, such as HR, and working up to the CEO/VP. Fortunately I beileve the use cases for something like this are agnostic enough that I have some flex in that area. And once it's introduced at a company, usage can easily be scaled up for them
Hi Taylor, cool landing page - one thing: what should happen when I type something and click join?
Because now I receive:
"There was an issue accessing the event, please try again"
Hi Varqu thanks for checking it out. I actually just noticed in my Google Analytics that someone might've tried typing a random access code
I just created an event which you can access from code #TL7CCN
These codes are unique to a specific event, which the site admin would send out to company employees
Cool, with the code it works.
For me it just seems a little bit misleading - because it looks like a CTA but when you actually type something (like her email) you get an error.
That's a great point - I'll make that much clearer with a label, and I'll create a permanent FAQ event, that will be visible, to help add context
(if you go back to the home page, you'll notice it'll show your recent visit to that event, so i can persist that for all newcomers with the permanent FAQ)
I've also been meaning to make that error page .. actually a page haha. I'll get on that
Nice landing page. May I know do you develop the CSS from scratch, or you purchase the CSS template from a marketplace?
I notice one thing. When you click on the menu link, all page switched instantly except the pricing. Its page margin and padding doesn't tally with others.
I used Bootstrap (v4) for the base of everything. For the landing page I borrowed some elements from a theme I found from this article: https://medialoot.com/blog/10-most-promising-free-bootstrap-4-templates-for-2017/
The admin dashboard also borrows slightly from a theme on there, but mostly just the responsive framing. The majority I customized directly on top of bootstrap
Thanks for the note about the pricing page, i'll tweak that!
That seems to be enterprise tool. So....pick up the phone and call. Or use linkedin and PM.
And you should definitely try building an app for Slack.
Yeah, absolutely. I guess I'm having a tough time figuring out who to even call/message, but it's probably best just to dive into it - get used to the process and shake off some of the nerves about it.
Slack for sure would be my first planned integration. Never dabbled in that before, so it'd be a fun one to do.