Credible
Consolidate reviews, show social proofs, measure results
Today we got featured on AppSumo, where we are offering an exclusive deal ($49 / year for Pro plan, originally priced at $999 / year) for a short period of time. Check it out at: https://appsumo.com/credible/
It's been a pleasure working with the team at AppSumo. They had been very responsive and very quick in setting up the workflow, terms, and integration. They also helped us refine the description:
Collect and present personalized customer reviews and actions as social proofs.
Customers are always in doubt when they visit new businesses online. With so much competition, there needs to be a way to make your operation stand out from the rest.
Thankfully, there is!
Customer reviews and actions from other customers, such as recent purchases, are the two most effective ways to address these consumer doubts.
Credible is a tool that enables businesses to collect and present personalized customer reviews and actions as social proofs to get more sales, collect more reviews, and - yep, you guessed it - become more credible.
Customers can easily install Credible on Shopify, WordPress, Square, or custom websites in just 1 minute.
The growth of our app had been stagnant for a quite some time, despite being featured on ProductHunt and BetaList. We looked into search keywords, customer feedback, and analytic data in details: there are at least 5 times more clicks from review-related keywords, compared to social proof related keywords (e.g. pop up, social proof, etc.). At this point it becomes obvious to us that the social proof market is more or less saturated until we have 10x features, but the review market is not.
This is further evidenced by customer feedback we got from https://itsmybag.store/ . The customer had been looking for a widget like ours to collect and present reviews for months (along with a series of other features in the backend). We had long conversations with customers like them, and reiterated our product using their feedback. The result: happy customers, and much lower cost per lead and cost per impression.
To our surprise, ProductHunt featured our product in their front page. Given the low number of upvotes and relatively little traction we got so far, we don't really feel we deserve it. But this is really encouraging :)
Here is part of our journey and what lies ahead: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/credible-personalized-customer-reviews-actions-social-aaron-li/
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/credible-reviews-social-proofs
There are many social proof apps out there. We don't want to just make another one. We want Credible to do three things for online businesses and shops: become more credible, get more sales, and collect more reviews. To do that, we want to make it really easy to use. This is what we did over the last 2 months:
- Integrated with Square, Stripe, and Zapier for capturing sales and actions (e.g. sign up, form submission, booking, ...)
- Integrated with SquareSpace, Weebly (Square) for easy installation (on top of Shopify and WordPress)
- Integrated with Google Maps and Facebook Page, for review aggregation.
- Created a widget that allows website to selectively display reviews. See https://spicygingercuisine.com/ for an example.
- Customization options (custom CSS, show duration, anonymized sales orders, review sources & rating, ...)
Lastly, we launched paid plans on both Shopify and on our website. It starts only at $1 / month and gives you ability to use social proof for up to 100 visitors per month.
What's coming next (very soon):
- Custom review imports (from CSV and other sources)
- Built-in analytics and A/B testing to help you understand conversion rate and effects of social proofs / reviews, and easily set up experiments
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Congrats!. Most Shopify apps are offering one tire as free. Does charging on base plan will affect the traction. How is your experience so far?
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Hard to tell at the moment. Things slowed down quite a bit. We need more content marketing to get more traffic. Overall, I think having a free tier adds a lot of work without much benefit to us.
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We are very happy to announce some results of Credible: we increased purchase conversion rate of some of our early customers by as much as 115%, based on 4 weeks of A/B testing (50%/50% traffic split). One customer is online food ordering website. Their offline business was severely impacted by COVID-19 pandemic, so the conversion rate of their online business became critical for their survival.
In early versions of this product, we onboard new customers by sending them a code snippet to add to their website, and set up their accounts for them manually using REST APIs. It was painful, slow, and gives customers an impression that the product is unreliable and not within their control, despite we already built the technical infrastructure to make it operate reliability.
This was slightly improved when we built apps and plugins for Shopify and WordPress, as we (semi-)automated the onboarding process when they install the app or plugin. Still, the lack of a dashboard makes it really inconvenient. Customers with custom website, including those built by no-code tools such as WebFlow, complained that the onboarding process is confusing, and they wanted to adjust certain parameter such as the minimum count threshold of when a proof is supposed to show up.
So we built a beta dashboard at https://credible.qokka.com/dashboard . Here, users are provided with visual, intuitive guidance for three simple steps they need to get Credible up and running on their website. They have a UI to control websites which Credible are installed, and adjust critical parameters easily. On integration page, they are provided with options to import / integrate data sources which they are likely already have, such as Stripe, Yelp, Google Locals, TripAdvisor, Reddit, Telegram, and others, though most of them are not yet available to most customers except those on Premium Beta.
Premium Beta is a paid plan we offer to early customers who want prioritized support, customizations, performance report, optimization services, and to be the first people who have access to latest features we built. The cost of Premium Beta is a one-time $250 fees, and we offer $500 back in credit, when we concludes the beta and launch version 1.0 of Credible. We would love to work with people on IndieHacker who face challenges in conversions and want to try a social proof solution, especially those in the space of e-commerce.
After almost 2 weeks of back-and-forth review, our Shopify app is finally listed on Shopify https://apps.shopify.com/credible-proof
Overall, Shopify team seems to be doing a great job helping out developers. The review was very thorough and aimed to make sure their apps are following good practices and being accurate in terms of descriptions and data shown to the merchant's visitors.
Compared to WordPress, Shopify app's security model seems work a lot better for us. Because requests from Shopify are authenticated and verifiable, we can automatically create an account in our system for everyone who installed our Shopify plugin, thus ensuring a seamless experience, as merchants can immediately see social proofs popping up on their websites. In contrast, we cannot do that for WordPress. We have to require an extra sign up step on our plugin's WordPress admin menu, because emails from WordPress are not verified and requests are not authenticated.
Another good thing about Shopify app compared to WordPress plugin is distribution model. After our app was approved, we quickly saw an inflow of users signing up. We observed some intermittent downloads of our WordPress plugin, but we barely see anyone signing up from WordPress.
Three and a half weeks in and we are finally ready to put our product out there: https://proof.qokka.com/
At present we cover three types of social proofs: visitor action, visitor count, and customer reviews (and community opinions). If you want to give it a try - please let us know you are from Indie Hackers in the sign up form, so we can give you a special discount!
Our goal for this month: build one solid case study and measure exactly how much different types of proofs can engage visitors.
We finished our v0.1 demo exactly 2 weeks after we started. It is a plain HTML page with the widget on bottom left, and we only have the bare minimum features: one-line integration, but it is good enough to show how it will look like when people install the widget. First website to integrate the widget: our own https://qokka.ai and my favorite restaurant back when I was in Canberra, Australia: http://spicygingercuisine.com/
First customer paid deposit to us - not too bad for a day 3. What we learned is e-commerce customers are the most passionate about this idea. Differentiation is the key - customers always ask what we do differently than the other social proof widgets. We hope we can answer that with the upcoming demo v0.1.
In mid 2019 we came up with the idea of leveraging the discussion data we crawled from the web, and make a plugin that enable website visitors to see activities and opinions from other people in the community. For a variety of reasons we had to put that project on halt, to focus on a B2B customer voice product for blockchain and cryptocurrency communities. This year, we finally have the time and opportunity to give this product idea a new fresh start. We noticed climbing trend of leveraging social proof widget, especially among e-commerce websites. Some companies making these tools gained amazing tractions, such as Useproof (20k+ customers in 2 years) who on average showed 20%+ conversion rate improvement. We hope with vast of customer voice data on the web and the power of AI / machine learning, we can provide a closed-loop solution that covers customer feedback + social listening + social proof, and make social proof less boring by showing more than just showing visitor activities.
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