Would you buy this?
I stumbled upon this business idea after a friend told me about his pains with building it himself. He had trouble building an FAQ page for his app. Some backend where you can add your faqs and you can the frontend is taken care for you. Something like helpjuice.com, but for small businesses.
What do you think? I want to know if you would pay for it, and how much. It would help me to understand if such a service is valuable. Thanks a bunch!
Hey Rison! Great initiative to put an idea in front of potential customers!
So what you are trying to build is a SaaS that provides self-serve support, correct?
I think the model is already validated (there are a lot of FAQ-as-a-Service businesses) so to answer your question it is: Yes, this would be useful.
However, in my opinion, the right question to ask is how you will differentiate yourself from the crowd (or put it another way: What is your added value for customers?) and what is your "unfair" distribution advantage once you have launched the product.
So you need: A great product (why would I use yours instead of the many other FAQ-as-a-service?) and a good distribution strategy to make sure you reach your target users!
Hi Robin, thanks for the feedback. Are you currently using any FAQ as a service product? If yes, how much are you currently paying?
So far I was only able to find helpjuice that does it exclusively and not part of a larger suite of products. And it is super expensive for smaller companies. Which is why I want to know if smaller guys would pay for such a service at an affordable rate and a faster website and mobile sdks.
Thanks for taking the time. :)
No problem. No we are not, for the simple reason that: We are a small business (and intend to remain so). For us, 5-6 questions and answers are sufficient for the moment.
Also one quick thought: Isn't the FAQ as a Service business model better suited for bigger businesses that have to deal with a huge load of inbound customer support requests?
However -- I might be wrong (look at what Pipedrive or Close.io did, they made sales software for SMB's and excelled at it)
Thanks for the insight. :) Helps a lot.
I had thought of this idea in the past as well and decided not to move forward because:
There are already a ton of larger systems out there that do everything from ticketing to FAQ and help pages. It's such a system that most bigger companies or people generating a lot of docs (for example software developers) are looking for. So FAQ-as-a-service wouldn't be enough for them.
I don't think small businesses are willing to pay for this on a monthly basis since it adds another cost to the ever-growing list. In terms of importance, paying for an FAQ page seems less important than paying for hosting, analytics, ...
Most websites are built with a CMS (like WordPress). Usually, those platforms offer (free) plugins to take care of additional features such as FAQ pages. In fact, I quickly googled and saw WordPress has a few free plugins out there.
I like the idea, but I think the market of users willing to pay will be simply too small to make this a mild success.
Thanks for the feedback. Good points.
If it's a large business, they'd get value out of a proper system (i.e. helpjuice), but if it's a small business they probably wouldn't want to spend money on unnecessary services. On top of that, smaller businesses tend to have very small FAQs. It doesn't seem like the best idea to me, but if you can find potential interested businesses then go for it.
Thanks for the reply. What you say makes a lot of sense.