Marvy

Not sure if I hate myself for saying "niched down" but I'm keeping it.

Our original idea for Marvy was to add async video to how product teams get feedback, bugs, questions, and praise from users.

We had a few calls with customers and tried to Mom Test it.

We didn't talk much about our idea until the end of the calls and mainly focused on how they do things today.

One big thing we learned was the way customers get bugs submitted by users comes with a lot of wasted time.

The bug reports are often just text with no screenshot or video. You have to figure out what the heck it means.

You also may need a follow-up call to see what was happening in dev tools.

We also learned that internally, teams send looms for bugs more frequently than they send product feedback. Not that the latter wouldn't be valuable, it's just not as common.

When they run into a bug, an early thought is capturing a visual to help the engineer who picks it up.

This is great for us - we don't need to climb mountains convincing prospects they should screencast bugs.

So we changed our broad focus on async video between a product team and users and decided to focus on bugs only for now.

This makes our offering much simpler to message and for prospects to grasp.

We can also auto-include console logs and errors with each bug screencast. This is an added layer of value so there is less back and forth wrangling technical details.

Lastly, this is clearly already something customers are paying for today. We aren't the first SaaS to try improving bug reports, though we do have our unique take on it.

We updated our landing page to reflect the new focus: https://www.marvy.so/.

Sam and I have been thinking on problems to solve for a good bit. This is one we both loved.

I've worked as a product manager for a while and there are a bunch of different problems you could solve related to product feedback for SaaS companies.

One is that it comes from everywhere - from sales, customer success, ideas portals, emails to support, meetings with product managers, and the list goes on. There are some super cool companies like Canny solving this feedback consolidation problem.

We aren't solving that. We're focused on feedback quality.

The thing with feedback via text is that it lacks a lot of context. There are so many times I've had to schedule a meeting with a customer because I had follow up questions regarding some feedback they submitted. Why did they want that feature? What is their workflow/use case? How much do they actually care?

This seemed like a fun problem to solve for us because we've experienced it and while there are several companies solving the feedback consolidation problem, the feedback quality problem doesn't have a lot of solutions available in the market.

Lastly, we're sort of riding a wave of popularity in asnc video messages. Loom has blown up for internal video communication and they recently released an SDK that we could potentially leverage.

Not having to build out the infrastructure around screen/cam recordings sounded great to us so we can focus on talking to customers and solving their problems.