Helpwise

Today, we announced the launch of our biggest update called Zenbox. Zenbox is an anxiety-free unified inbox for customer support reps to handle customer queries without any anxiety or stress.

During regular user interviews and surveys (& even talking to our own customer support team), we found that over 92% of customer support reps reported high blood pressure, anxiety, and stress-related disorder. To solve this problem and make the job of customer support rep anxiety & stress-free, the product & engineering team at Helpwise decided to change their approach towards how customer queries are handled.

After months of experimentation and getting feedback from 100s of customer support reps, we are finally ready with our first version of an anxiety-free inbox called Zenbox.

Zenbox gives a tindersque approach to how pending customer queries are presented and handled by a customer support rep. It is a minimalist inbox that brings forward all the pending/important conversations in front of you with only enough information required to help you focus and get done by tasks at hand.

We have a long and existing roadmap to further improve this. My team & I will be looking forward to hearing your feedback, ideas, and suggestions.

We're live on ProductHunt. So, do share your love: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/zenbox-1

Find answers to some useful questions around building Helpwise.io into $100K ARR within a few months of launching:

1. How much did it cost us to build our product?
2. How did I come up with the idea?
3. Early marketing strategies
4. How we overcame early challenges?
5. 3 books that helped me build 2 profitable SaaS businesses in parallel (JustCall: >$4mil ARR and Helpwise: >$100K ARR)

https://www.failory.com/interview/helpwise

Helpwise (https://helpwise.io) has been growing organically since our launch last year. To build some momentum and get feedback, we took Helpwise to Appsumo to run a deal.

The deal went live on 6th April and since then, we have sold over 1000+ deal codes.

About Appsumo experience:

To begin with, you have to make peace with the fact that users referred by Appsumo will be Lifetime Deal users so they are not going to pay you again.

During the deal, you must provide amazing customer support. If you don't have a team to do so, better not go for the Appsumo deal route.

Appsumo Community is a world of its own with own rules and expectations. What is normal in the usual SaaS space doesn't work in LTD (lifetime deals space). LTD buyers want everything with the best support without paying the right price for it. For example, many of them started bullying us to remove the logo for Helpwise from their account as they have paid for the service :-|

So, it may get frustrating at times. But, then there are 10% buyers who will give you such useful feedback that it will make it worthwhile.

Running LTD can be a great option for early-stage startups with simple products with straight forward pricing. It will get you great feedback along with some cash which you can spend on hiring or advertising.

5 things to keep in mind if you are planning to go for Appsumo deal:

1. Don't offer too much in the deal for single coupon code (we made a mistake)
2. Have a product roadmap page on the your website
3. Clearly mention if your product offers white-labeling or not and if it is a good fit for agencies & how.
4. Don't run this deal for more than 1 month
5. Don't offer your biggest/most premium plan as part of the deal because LTD buyers expect you to give them access to any new feature added to that plan in future

Given my mixed experience, will I run another Appsumo deal in the future? Absolutely! Appsumo campaign is a great way to generate momentum & some useful cash if run at the right stage with the right deal structure.

Hope you will find this useful. If you are looking for a shared inbox for email, SMS and WhatsApp - try Helpwise today :)

We launched Helpwise as shared email inbox but after receiving feedback from our early customers, we have now launched Shared Inbox for SMS and WhatsApp.

So, as a team can access and manage single SMS or WhatsApp number, assign texts among each other and even, collaborate around the replies.

Both SMS and WhatsApp inboxes come with Snooze, Saved Replies and Schedule features as well. Also, both the inboxes integrate with other business tools like CRM, Stripe, JustCall etc.

To learn about SMS Inbox: https://helpwise.io/shared-sms-inbox

To learn about WhatsApp Inbox: https://helpwise.io/whatsapp-business-inbox

I build SaaS products for living and recently, launched Helpwise (https://helpwise.io) - shared inbox for teams to manage team emails like help@, sales@, jobs@, etc. Here I'm going to share how we reached $6k MRR within 77 days of launch.

We built this product because we had tried the two other main players in the market and felt that these products are
1)expensive
2)complex

On 2nd Dec'19, we launched on PH. Kept following things in mind:

1. Use GIF in the thumbnail
   2.Product screenshots
2. Post close to 12:00 am PST
3. Never indulge in fake voting

We ended that day in 4th position! Coming in the top 5 on Product Hunt opens a lot of early PR opportunities. So, we go covered by a number of niche blogs.

We spent $1k on SEO & $200 in FB Ads targeting job profiles like Support Manager, HR Manager, etc. To break some users (similar to us) from existing players, we built 1-click account migration for both Front and Help Scout from day 1. Also, we built a few other integrations (Stripe, Twilio, Pipedrive, etc.) to get some distribution going for us as early as possible.

We signed up 500+ users within 1st week. We priced the product the way we wanted it to be as a customer of other shared inbox offerings in the market. And, the pricing was also partly influenced by our love for Basecamp. So, we have 2 plans - free and $99/m for unlimited users.

When you have a free plan, it is very important to design that free plan smartly. If you don't put the controls on features at the right trigger point, you will miss out on the upgrades. Hence, we spent more time on planning our free plan than our paid plan. The idea really was to figure out the stage at which a small startup feels the pain of email chaos and is ready to pay for the solution. So, we offer the product for free for up to 5 team members. If you need anything more than that, pay $99/m.

In 77 days, we have converted 52 accounts (4% of signups) into paid @ avg $120/month.

I hope this is useful for some of you.

I build SaaS products for living and recently, launched Helpwise (https://helpwise.io) - shared inbox for teams to manage team emails like help@, sales@, jobs@, etc. Here I'm going to share how we reached $6k MRR within 77 days of launch.

We built this product because we had tried the two other main players in the market and felt that these products are
1)expensive
2)complex

On 2nd Dec'19, we launched on PH. Kept following things in mind:

1. Use GIF in the thumbnail
   2.Product screenshots
2. Post close to 12:00 am PST
3. Never indulge in fake voting

We ended that day in 4th position! Coming in the top 5 on Product Hunt opens a lot of early PR opportunities. So, we go covered by a number of niche blogs.

We spent $1k on SEO & $200 in FB Ads targeting job profiles like Support Manager, HR Manager, etc. To break some users (similar to us) from existing players, we built 1-click account migration for both Front and Help Scout from day 1. Also, we built a few other integrations (Stripe, Twilio, Pipedrive, etc.) to get some distribution going for us as early as possible.

We signed up 500+ users within 1st week. We priced the product the way we wanted it to be as a customer of other shared inbox offerings in the market. And, the pricing was also partly influenced by our love for Basecamp. So, we have 2 plans - free and $99/m for unlimited users.

When you have a free plan, it is very important to design that free plan smartly. If you don't put the controls on features at the right trigger point, you will miss out on the upgrades. Hence, we spent more time on planning our free plan than our paid plan. The idea really was to figure out the stage at which a small startup feels the pain of email chaos and is ready to pay for the solution. So, we offer the product for free for up to 5 team members. If you need anything more than that, pay $99/m.

In 77 days, we have converted 52 accounts (4% of signups) into paid @ avg $120/month.

I hope this is useful for some of you.

Our Product Hunt launch went great - better than our expectations (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/helpwise)

We got around 700 visits and 50+ folks started their free trial with us.

We are starting to get some useful feedback to start improving our product and proceed towards product-market fit.

We are now live on Product Hunt and getting good response so far. Super excited (with some anxiety as we have worked really hard on this) 🙈

If you like what we have built or the problem we are trying to solve, please share some love here on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/helpwise

We are looking forward to getting feedback from our users to further develop and improve the product hence have launched a free plan for startups like us. So, feel free to give it a spin.

Helpwise.io is a shared inbox for team emails like help@, sales@, jobs@ etc. So, I ran a basic scrapper and found some of the companies using jobs@ or help/support@ emails.

Then I found HR Heads and Customer Support Heads for those companies on Linkedin. And, started reaching out to them with a really small message. Something like

"Hey Joe, noticed that you are using jobs@yourcompany.com email. So, if you want to get an opinion on some resumes, do you forward that to team members or slack them or share screenshots?

We are building a product to address this very use case. Will you be interested in learning more about the solution? "

And, we got some positive replies along with one paid user.

If you are readimg this: you're most welcome on Helpwise to setup you Support, Sales, Finance etc mailboxes :)