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47 Comments

I spent > 500 hours on this SaaS. Still unsure if someone needs this

I'm an indie SaaS builder stuck in the build trap ๐Ÿ˜….
The fear of launching has pretty much paralyzed me for months now and I'm looking for feedback, candid advice, encouragement, discouragement to get to the next step.

Support would be much appreciated by testing or reviewing:
๐Ÿ‘‰ What would you change before a PH launch? * https://pliik.dev

  • What makes this useful?
  • What makes this useless?
  • Does this pass the โ€œI get itโ€ test?
    Simple yes/no answers are also helpful.

I can't count the times I've read or heard on a podcast to launch early and often. Oh, shame on me for having put off the launch forever. I'm here to better myself.

I love reviewing products so just paste a link and let me know what type of feedback you are looking for.

๐Ÿ™Much obliged!

*UPDATE: I updated the landing page and included my learnings from the feedback.
The page from the original post is here: https://pliik.dev

  1. 3

    It seems interesting to me, maybe because I have been in this field for some time.

    For strangers, not sure. It would be great to know who exactly is the user and how can your product help.

    In your headline and description, I read the function and features. While the value proposition and the "Why"s, a bit weak.

    The website looks clean and the product looks amazing as well. Some copywriting might help! @jonas_b

    1. 2

      Hey @felix12777 thanks! Much appreciated and completely agree with your points. I need to improve my copywriting game.

      BTW checked out your PH Launch Post amazing!

      Besides the copy, anything I need to get sorted before launching on PH?

      Thanks for the website kudos! Made possible by @alexanderisora from unicornplatform

      1. 2

        Way to go, man!

      2. 1

        Big pleasure and glad to hear you built this on Unicorn Platform by Alex

        Besides copy -> I'd spend some effort to create buzz before publishing a PH campaign. Make use of your social media or here!

  2. 3

    Howdy from Zurich as well! If you ever want to come by our little IndieHackers space at Hirschengraben to talk this over, just let me know :) (maybe after our cases cool down a little :P )

    Pliik looks interesting and I get what it does. Even more, I get how it does it, but not exactly why I should care. If you are writing copy, it's a great thing to think about the benefits, instead of the features.

    For example, "Feedback Analytics & Insights Platform" doesn't get me excited or interested, but one of your other comments is on point "Create happy customers that churn less and promote more", that gets me interested.

    "Like Segment for conversations" -> Get more out of your conversations

    "COLLATE ALL CONVERSATIONS IN ONE PLACE" -> Never lose your conversations again

    "REPORTS" -> Accessible insights for your whole team

    Hope that makes a point? Your copy describes exactly what your product does, but never what benefit I am getting from that. See whether you can write a new copy that leaves out anything that's vague.

    Other than that, I am sure your service is awesome. The best way you can get more validation on that is to get people in the door.

    1. 1

      Howdy right back at you๐Ÿ‡จ๐Ÿ‡ญ๐Ÿ‘‹
      I'd love to have a chat @Hirschengraben did not even know there is an IH space in Zรผrich.
      Great points and a recurring theme, so I'm taking this to heart.
      Thanks for the encouragement and uplifting review, I'm awed by all the amazing people helping out here.
      See you soon!

  3. 3

    Sounds like I would need a one on one advisor to help me understand how this fits in. Looks and sounds useful, but sounds complicated. Worrisome combo.

    1. 2

      @Red8lima thanks man, yeah that combo is def not what I am going for. Also, I'm not trying to upsell consulting for people to "get it".
      Thanks for the constructive feedback, that's what I came for.

  4. 3

    I don't know what you do.

    I use a lot of those tools you work with and still don't know what you do.

    How would you explain it to a friend?

    1. 1

      Thanks for the candid feedback - the only way to improve!

      Here is what I would say to my friend:
      Happy customers are less likely to churn and more likely to promote you.
      Making them happy is pretty hard and starts with listening to what they have to say.

      Sales and customer success are closest to your customers.
      If they use chat or email to communicate with them, loads of valuable feedback is contained in those conversations.

      Pliik automatically integrates with communication tools and grabs the relevant bits of feedback and organizes them for you. What is the conversation about, what features were mentioned, how did the user feel about them and what was the nature of the statement (question, complaint, compliment)?

      As you can see I have a patient friend who has a lot of time to listen to me :)
      How do I fix this?

      Thanks @joshdance

      1. 5

        I would do something like this

        "Pliik integrations with your customer communication tools, and stores and organizes their feedback." - that is what it does. Next you need the value. Why? Why is this important?

        Next question is who is this for? Like who in the company is going to use this tool?

      2. 3

        Read it, got it. If that text would be on the front page, would have understood immediately what the tool does.

      3. 2

        Elevator pitch. Less than sixty seconds. You have to practice getting one of those crafted for yourself, and they're much harder to come up with than doing the heavy lifting of producing a quality software product.

        Your product goals are clear to me, but I just made an earlier post about how my team works hard to extricate out customers from, and eradicate Hubspot in favor of FOSS like Mautic which is self hosted, free, and does the same thing.

        Divorcing oneself from Hubspot is a multi-step, non-trivial process, and they don't make it any easier on the customer, so no, I wouldn't have any use for your product whatsoever in its current incarnation of software it supports but that's doesn't mean it's not useful as such, or won't see versions that work with other platforms as well.

        Fromm the preview it looks to be quite the relevant integration that many a support center might need to leverage data from in helping to address
        their so-called, "CS".

  5. 3

    I would suggest you rearrange your landing page copy so that you start by explaining the problem you solve, because I didn't get much insight from your first two sections ("Feedback Analytics & Insights Platform" is super generic, Segment for Feedback is even more confusing).

    It sounds like your value prop is that customer feedback flows in through a wide range a customer support channels and then gets lost to the ages as it never gets consolidated into one place.

    This sounds like a system or record for centralizing customer support feedback that comes in across your various customer support channels. I'm still not completely clear on how it actually works -- do you have to paste some code somewhere and then it collects via API? How would setup work? Is it self service? Does it work based on integrations? Where is it getting the feedback from?

    In some ways, this reminds me of something like People.ai (which automatically pulls sales activity into CRM / analytics platform and analyzes using NLP), but solving a problem that's either less severe.

    Have you talked to anyone who you think might have your problem yet? Do they actually care about this / think they have your problem? What kind of job title would you try to sell this to -- product managers?

    1. 1

      Thank you, @drudg3 for sharing this, also for highlighting the weak spots on the landing page. The "why, how, what", value proposition (clarity) and "who is the customer" definitely need work.

      I realize that I also need to make it much more obvious that the feedback comes in through integrations (either dedicated integrations like for HubSpot data or via Zapier) .

      I've worked with other product teams in a consulting capacity (helped with testing ideas, prototyping, early products, customer interviews) and noticed that most of them struggle with becoming more user / customer oriented as a team or organization. Specifically, the "CEO" or Product Managers I worked with, wanted a better understanding of what customers want. The problems were always that they did not know how to approach analyzing feedback and usually went searching for new feedback instead of reviewing existing data from sales and customer support.

      The problem with the problem is indeed a bit that users don't know they have this problem / it's not super urgent / directly connected to revenue.

      People.ai looks super interesting and it's a direction some people have suggested when I talked to them about Pliik. At heart, I guess I'm a product person and would love to make something for Product teams.

      Thank you ๐Ÿ™

      1. 2

        I mention People.ai only as a better analogy than say Segment to understand what it is you are doing, not to suggest that you pivot (given the resources companies like People.ai and Salesforce are putting into their solutions, that would probably not be a great idea).

        I think the problem you are solving for is actually extremely important and lots of companies spend huge amounts of money trying to solve it -- but it's not the problem you narrowly define on your landing page.

        The ultimate problem you solve is helping companies uncover what their customers actually want / need so that they can improve their products, increase customer retention and potentially even improve conversion rates when selling to new customers.

        My challenge with the way you present it is that you're overly focused on the "how" of your solution and not communicating the problem, why it's important and urgent, and then explaining why your solution to this problem (using NLP / integrations to pull insights into a central platform that are hiding in siloed data on their existing systems) is better than the alternatives (things like customer research software like Qualaroo or UserTesting or old school in-person focus groups).

        In terms of reframing your mindset from your product and features to customer pain points and their considerations when buying a solution to your problem, I would suggest you look at some of Pedro Cortes' work: https://www.cortes.design/post/saas-landing-page-formula-examples https://www.cortes.design/saas-landing-page-cheatsheet

        1. 1

          Yeah! Could not have said that better, it's a new or complimentary approach to doing customer research and discovery.

          I feel the same way, it is an important problem and it's my conviction that it can be done much better.

          These resources are gold! Thanks for sharing @drudg3.

          1. 2

            ๐Ÿ‘One last note: since you're B2B, I'd highly recommend spending more time on prospecting to get conversations with potential customers instead of spending too much time making your landing page perfect. A lot of pre-launch companies don't even put up a real landing page (it might just be a headline and an email capture) until after they've lined up their first few potential customers. Now is the time to do things that don't scale!

  6. 2

    Your tagline should be something like, "aggregate feedback from multiple sources" and also "analyze collected feedback". Only after I read through the site a few times and even looked up what Segment does did I really understand.

    It's true, people post feedback everywhere, from Intercom, Canny, Github issues, and it's hard to collect and make sense of every single one, so I'd definitely use your app, but it needs to be better marketed. My primary problem is I don't want to look at 10 different feeds, I just want to look at one, and if the app can do some natural language processing to identify similar pieces of feedback, that's great too, but this is definitely not required in the beginning, I just want to collate first.

    1. 2

      Hey @satvikpendem great feedback!
      Valid and valuable points about the copy and marketing. @drudg3 shared some super actionable tips that I've tried to implement. I'm pretty sure it needs more work though.

      I also removed the segment thing, I think that was confusing for too many ppl.

      Thanks also for sharing your personal perspective on the problem. If this is an actual problem you experience atm I'd be more than happy to demo and collate the sources you have.

      Thanks again for your time and thoughts ๐Ÿ™

      1. 1

        I don't have the problem currently but I have had it in the past for some previous products. I'll keep you in mind for my current products though.

  7. 2

    please add direct integration with HelpScout and I am your client

    1. 1

      Hi @MacPlus, my day could not have started better - thank you!
      I'd love to set it up with you, should take about 5 minutes to connect.
      https://calendly.com/jonas-baertsch/pliik-onboarding

      I've just put in a Zapier template (review pending). Will post again once it's accepted.
      pliik & helpscout

      If Zapier is not your thing, I've checked the developer docs looks like all the APIs are there to make a dedicated integration work as well.
      I'm new to Help Scout, curious how you'd like Pliik to work for you.

      Thanks for your support!
      Jonas

      1. 2

        Beware potential users who say they'll buy after you add feature X. Most of the time it does not happen, and you'll end up building a behemoth of a product even before getting sales. Instead, ask them to pay first and then say you'll incorporate their feature request. Win win for both of you, no wasted time on your part, and you validate if that user will truly be a customer of your product.

        1. 1

          Hey @satvikpendem sounds like you've experienced this first hand. Thanks for the heads up - great advice.
          In the case of integrations I feel like I could go all out without cluttering or bloating the product. The hard thing is indeed figuring out what to dedicate build time to. An upfront payment would help make sure no time is wasted either way.

      2. 1

        integration with Zapier does not suit me, it is too expensive

        1. 1

          Makes sense, I'll look into a native integration.
          If you have a moment to chat I could set things up for you with the Help Scout API / Webhooks.

  8. 2

    I do get it from visiting the site. It looks like a cool product. Only thing I didn't get is - how would you get my email? Do you connect to g-suite, for example? I also have privacy concerns around letting someone read my email.

    Have you considered e.g making this work on public sources of feedback, like forum posts or one of those public feedback tools like Canny, etc? I'd be much more comfortable using it on something like that.

    1. 1

      Hey @aliakhtar thanks, for your kind words. Great point, integrating with email comes with a much higher concern than sourcing from public feedback.

      Canny is a super interesting one. I don't have access to an account. It does have zaps for new posts and comments so that should work.
      Yeah, kind of meta but I'd love to put all this feedback into pliik too without copy pasting each message.

      Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feedback!

      pliik for canny

  9. 2

    I understand what you do after reading the page and watching the demo, but the headline and copy does not resonate with me.

    Your โ€œFeedback Analyzerโ€ is gold! Have you shared that with prospects? I didnโ€™t see this linked on the page. Iโ€™ll give it a go with some actual user comments.

    If I had to market your product, Iโ€™d focus on one role instead โ€œsales, product, and marketingโ€ teams as you described in the demo. If you convey the product managerโ€™s problem looking for and interpreting feedback, then you can be THE solution for their problem. This could naturally extend to multiple landing pages for different teams or roles problems. You give solid examples in the demo, by the way, for each of the different teams.

    Also, I have a suite of products but Iโ€™m not sure if the solution is for me. For instance, we use intercom (x2), email, and salesforce for support. Gathering, analyzing, and taking action on feedback is a challenge and right now I do it manually and ad-hoc each time. Iโ€™d pay for this on the spot, if I understood it better.

    1. 1

      Hey @grey_beard thanks for the detailed feedback. Your point about the copy and focussing on one specific user & problem totally resonates with me.

      It's so interesting that this simple demo conveys the message so much faster and better than the landing page.

      I've got Pliik running on my intercom as well and I'm really pleased with that. It's an integration I have not yet published.
      I'd love to demo an/or set it up for you if you're interested.
      https://calendly.com/jonas-baertsch/pliik-demo

      "Gathering, analyzing, and taking action on feedback is a challenge and right now I do it manually and ad-hoc each time."
      ^^ would love to learn more about this.
      How do you gather the feedback today? What kind of actions do you take? What tools do you use to gather, organize and where do you take action?

      How Pliik does it:

      • Aggregate / collate via integrations: you allow Pliik to get the data from for instance intercom as it comes in.
      • Analyze: new messages are 'dissected', analyzed, and labeled (like in the demo)
      • Organize: the dissected messages are indexed so you can always search and share them.
      • Visualize: the dashboard gives you a weekly overview of overall topics, sentiment and extracts the most important statements (queries, feedback, positive, negative)
        Does that explain it better? What's still missing or unclear, what can I improve?

      Thanks @grey_beard super helpful to get your perspective!

      1. 1

        Happy to discuss more on the feedback process. I'll check your open time for tomorrow. Essentially, it is heavy on intercom, email survey, and direct emails. Our support emails go to intercom as well.

        Once we've collected enough comments, then it goes to tagging, grouping, and analyzing the comments. Usually, try to group into categories with specific actions. For instance, issues or bugs [goes straight to dev queue], concerns [schedule meeting], ideas [address in roadmap]. We try to communicate the outcome too, which requires follow-up emails. People really appreciate this and it always surprises me how few SaaS PM's actually do this.

        "I've got Pliik running on my intercom as well and I'm really pleased with that. It's an integration I have not yet published."

        Time to publish! This is a missing piece in intercom, imo.

        1. 1

          Hi @grey_beard
          Thanks for sharing your approach in detail, that really helps a lot in understanding the problem > shaping the solution.

          a) Tag
          b) Group / Cluster
          c) Distribute (for instance to an issue queue or feature request list)
          d) Follow-up (closing the loop)

          Loving this!

          Intercom

          Time to publish! This is a missing piece in intercom, imo.
          I'm on it!
          For now, I've created a doc on how to do it with a 5-10 minute setup.
          Setup Guide

          Looking forward to our chat! Thanks for your support, it means a lot to me.

  10. 2

    I'm launching myself a SAAS and I am in the same boat as you, I could have released it 1 month ago but still finding excuses ^^ (but plan to launch it clearly this week!)

    To give you some feedbacks on your SAAS, after visiting the landing page I don't see clearly how it can bring me value, maybe I'm not the right target, but looking at the pricing I don't see what is a "highlight". Maybe it's just me.

    • when you click on the "pricing" butto on the nav bar, it doesn't work.
    1. 1

      Hey @aniscra hopefully the public accountability helps in getting launched. Let me know when you do or if you'd like some pre-launch feedback.
      Highlights are sentences or parts of messages that are labelled by the system or the user. I might need to rename that.
      Thanks for your feedback also for pointing out the bug (fixed thanks to you).

      1. 1

        Thanks,
        How the public accountability works here? you just add a post and gather some feedbacks? In that case I'll post something here and will let you know :)

        Best

        1. 1

          With public accountability, I meant putting this out there should make it harder for me to crawl back into my safespace and launch already ;)
          And yes, post what you are building and get that feedback in as early as you can.

          1. 1

            This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

  11. 2

    Certainly looks legit. And I think I get it. It's a way to do analytics on user feedback right?

    It's unclear to me how it injests the feedback though. Does it integrate with my email? Do I have to put in the feedback.

    I might see this as useful if I were a bit larger. Right now, I'm content with putting all of the feedback I get into a text file and organizing it from there. I find the act of manually organizing gives me an intuitive insight into the feedback and I'm not sure if graphs would give me the same thing.

    Also, I think for me, I'm always hesitant to share my email unless I'm very sure it will be useful.

    Here is an idea, is there something you could do for free with my user feedback that demoed a small part of your app without me putting in my email? That would help demonstrate its value - for me at least.

      1. 1

        Lol. Touche. Oh man, I tried to be neutral but the AI doesn't lie.

        Seeing this now, I am much more intrigued. Okay, here is my advice: Post this on your landing page. Set a cookie. Let people type in only a few instances of user feedback before you cut them off and make them signup. E.g. grammerly shows you some things for free. It was slightly useful to me. It took a few weeks for me to decide to pay for their full offering. I wouldn't have just bought it without having them correct my basics for free first.

        For me, sentiment and intent are somewhat useful but what would make me want this as a larger company with real customers would be if it could surface broad insights. If people keep saying the landing page is too blue, but in different ways, I would want that insight surfaced to the top so I know to change that first.

        Also, should go without saying but I don't think I'm your target market. It sounds like you are nervous about trying to sell this. Don't be. It could be useful to a lot of businesses and if it's not, then that is a data point.

        I think you're on to something. Happy to talk more if my feedback is useful at all.

        1. 1

          Haha, I just ran my response, turns out I write marketing copy :)

          Great idea, I was wondering about how to get people more interested / invested by trying it with real / own content. I'll put this in a more visible spot.

          Yeah, these type of simple analysis is very limited in value. It is useful for automatically organizing content but the real magic happens when more qualitative data can be turned into actionable stuff.

          Would love to talk more and also learn what disqualifies you for the product. Thanks for the words of encouragement - gives a solo builder hope!

          1. 1

            Want to set something up for tomorrow? You're roughly my target market and I'd like to ask a few questions - not pitching... just trying to understand my market better.

            If so, this is my calendly link: https://calendly.com/scott-fastmap

            1. 1

              Booked, awesome!

    1. 1

      Hey @scottrogowski! Amazing feedback, thanks for your time and thoughts.
      Here are some playgrounds I've build the last two weeks:
      https://app.pliik.dev/demos/analyzer (the screenshot)
      https://app.pliik.dev/demos/xls-analyzer

      I can relate to not having as much feedback that Pliik would be needed, I'm here to get more and I can manage all the feedback myself.
      Also, the point you make about the value of organizing (and therefore reading) all feedback totally resonates with me.

      When I think about a flow of how teams work with feedback I'm thinking along the lines of:
      Phase 1: We don't have enough, process everything ourselves
      Phase 2: Get organized, feedback is increasing and xls, notion, airtables come into play.
      Phase 3: Too much to understand what's happening.

      With this current version I'm trying to make feedback a first class citizen in the data that teams rely on. Mainly storing and organizing and also increase the interactions with feeback by sending important customer statements once per week.
      I'd love to eventually be able to provide more "so what" type insights for instance extract / generate new directions a product team could go in, based on feedback.

      Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts!
      Happy to get you free access with login credentials so you can skip the signup.

      1. 2

        Ack. I didn't see this other comment. Surface those demos better! I didn't spot them on the landing page.

        I'll try this out with some of my feedback later today or tomorrow.

  12. 2

    I like your landing page quite a lot. It is minimal, balanced, and informative - not an easy feat to pull off. Kudos!

    What problem is it solving?

    So long as it solves a problem, I canโ€™t see why you wouldnโ€™t get traction.

    Nicely done! ๐Ÿ™ƒ

    1. 1

      Wow ๐Ÿ˜€thanks for taking the time to check it out. Super happy with your feedback of course but have to share the landing page kudos with @alexanderisora and https://unicornplatform.com - made the design look good without doing much design myself (except for screenshots).
      ๐Ÿ™

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