RetroBox
A Slack app for facilitating bias-free team retrospectives
Our freemium model limited users to have maximum 2 team retrospectives per month. We liked this approach because it meant people could spread the word without having to pay for the product in the long term, and because we really like to have users who are happy to use our product (paying for it or not).
After using this model for over a year, we've decided to switch to a more restricted model where you use RetroBox as much as you like for 2 months, then you have to pay to keep using it.
The main reason for the change is we failed to reach our goal of 10 paying users. Also we believe the generous freemium model we used has an increased noise/signal ratio. Because it makes it harder to know if users like the product enough to pay for it.
I'm pleased to say our change in the freemium & pricing model has been received well. Some non-paying users are now paying for the product, and we are closer to our goal of 10 paying customer / month than ever before. EDIT: we reached our goal shortly after writing this!
We have a couple of things in our development pipeline to improve the user experience. The next thing we're working on will definitely make us the best Slack app for team retrospectives, if we are not already. We got a new domain too: https://retroboxapp.com - I don't know why we didn't get this (or a similar) domain before... The old one https://retrobox.signaldata.xyz served us well but it's a bit of a mouthful. We will also be hiring a designer to design us a better landing page, our current landing page is very textual and we want one that has visuals that communicate the value proposition more succinctly.
Took us a while! The fact that we're scratching our own itch kept us going. We've improved the user experience to a decent level. Tried a couple different pricing that didn't work, but finally we seem to have found a good price point and payment options. We now have 3 paying customers. Next goal is 10 paying customers. Been thinking about diversifying the product a bit which is currently very much focused on team retrospectives.
Added an email subscription form for potential users to subscribe to release notes. I believe this might also indicate how much interest people show in the product. So if you find the product interesting and think you might use it, please sign up. No spamming, only release notes.
I call it "MVP" in quotes because I did not intend this to be a "product" per se. I built this Slack app for my own needs but why not share it here to see if other people also find it useful?
This "MVP" Slack app helps you facilitate Agile Retrospective meetings. It takes feedback from users anonymously on Slack (one Retro session per Slack channel) during an iteration. At the time of the retro meeting, the facilitator can publish the anonymous feedback items collected to be discussed in the meeting.
My TODO list:
- Voting on Retro items to be discussed
- Record action items
- Allow users to export all Retro data in some form
We wanted a simple Slack app that helps you facilitate Retrospective meetings in an unbiased way. There are many Retrospective projects on the web, these are usually web sites. We wanted something simple that worked on Slack, that allowed us to export our data freely, and that guided people to follow the best known practices when doing Retrospective meetings.
2 Comments
gotta keep experimenting!
Congrats! Big and smart move to get the needle pointing to the right direction. FYI: my company does Retro's once per month. so we would've slid in the free category forever too.