Kollect

At the beginning we thought that our main customers would be digital agencies, based on this premise:

Our software —a tool that automates lead generation & customer support on Facebook— will benefit social media managers, and since they usually work for digital agencies, they will be our main customers

But after months of reaching out dozens of them, only 1 used our software to manage their clients Facebook Pages. I think they thought our software was expensive or unnecessary, because, at the end of the day, they pay their employees to make their job, so: "why to spend $$$ to make they live easier?".

So we made a switch in our product (launched version 1.1), and then we started contacting corporations (the agencies' customers) directly.

That made a huge difference.

I think that's because, for the corporations, Kollect is not just a tool for saving time to the social media managers, is a tool that automates processes, and connect more quickly with their users and customers.

So far (I'm writing this on February 15, 2020), we have 18 Users (2 paying customers and 16 using our demo), have collected 2500+ leads from inbox and comments, and have processed 11,000+ conversations.

Hope soon we start closing more deals and growing our company :)

Today me and @CesarHipolito we are launching Kollect on Product Hunt 😃 🥳

You can find it here: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/kollect

This is after months of hard work and having a few but super insightful beta users from which we have learned a lot to have this 1.0 version.

Kollect is a web app that classifies and collects messages and contact info (emails and phone numbers) from Facebook Page's inbox and comments, so you forget about CTRL C + CTRL V.

With Kollect you can:

• Collect your users' Name, Email, Phone and Message from your Facebook Page's inbox and comments.
• Validate the e-mail and phone number format, so you only collect valid information. Doesn't matter if your users type XXX-XXX-XXX or (XXX)XXX-XXX or +XXX XXX XXX.
• Collect all the data in real time and also on demand (querying date ranges).
• Create automatic replies to your leads depending on keywords or events.
• Create custom fields to automatically classify your leads.
• Export the data whenever you want on XLSX or CSV format.
• Send your leads to your favorite CRM via our very simple webhooks.

After a lot of googling, we made a Google Spreadsheet with a few hundreds of digital agencies in Peru (where our company is based), specially focused on lead generation on Facebook.

I started cold emailing and calling one by one, inviting them to join our private beta. We gave them full-access accounts and also helped each one of them to set up their accounts, so they could take advantage of Kollect's full potential.

Our private beta hasn't finished already, and we are cold emailing companies from another countries of Latam and also we are planning to launch on USA and Europe in the next few weeks. Said that, we are open to hear from you if you want to try our app, whenever you come from :)

One of the biggest challenges we faced while making this app was to deal with the new app review process of Facebook developers. Or at least that was what we thought before send our submission, because all of the comments of angry developers saying that Facebook delayed that process up to 5 months.

The reality is that the process was very quick for us (took us a couple days for each submission), and the Facebook team was really helpful with the feedback.

So when our app got approved by Facebook we knew that, since that moment, everything depend on us.

In early 2017, I ran a Facebook Ads campaign for the company I was working at (a real estate company), and the campaign generated thousands of comments and inboxes from people asking to be contacted. They sent their e-mail and phone number, and my boss told me to collect all that information and send it to the sales team 🤯

So... instead of running crazy, I wrote a script to do the work for me, and a year later me and my cofounder decided to turn the script into a web app to help other social media people dealing with similar situations 😉