Since 2017 I've been building SignalZen outside my day job. I took 3 months off work to build the MVP and launch it as a free Customer Support Live Chat widget on your website or app.
At first it got a lot of signups. Of course the first thing I learned was that the product needed work. Bug reports were wild.
After a year of improving the product, I decided to charge for the product. Nobody upgraded. It was a disaster. But somehow I felt like there was still opportunity here.
There was this one customer, who time and time again bugged me to add a slack integration so he could answer customer support requests directly from slack.
At first I didn't think much of it. But he was persistent that it would help him and his team answer support requests much faster, save them the pain of having yet another place they're getting important notifications, and collaborate better on supporting their users.
I bought in, built the features, and it changed SignalZen. All the sudden I was differentiated in a good way. Since then I've gotten much more users.
And I can say from personal experience, responding to SignalZen customer support requests from Slack is way easier.
Fast forward to today, the product is in great shape and people come to us for a specific use.
I suppose the lesson is to listen to customer support requests. But more than that, its that the customer support requests that seem odd at first are the most helpful. If they are strange then it's likely your competitors aren't doing it.
Which means you can be different.
I'll keep making SignalZen better by listening to customers (we added responding to requests from MS Teams), and hopefully we can make responding to customer support requests even easier and faster.
great post.
i feel like when you're starting out you can have all these assumptions but they really don't mean sh*t until you actually starting talking to people.
it's one of the reasons i think ideas are useless, but what you do with them that matters more.
like i built this investment tracking platform a couple years ago that i thought had some really nice features. but really i was just building what i thought was cool and not what people actually needed.
took me like 6 months to realise that though so it did hurt a bit. things like startupschool and ideahub help though.
now everything i do i literally wont build anything until i have at least 100 people on a waitlist that i can draw information out of.
basically saves you that first 3 months where you've built something but have no idea if people actually want it or not.
100 people, that's a lot. How do you get to such a number?
I totally agree, can you share how you get people onto a wishlist? do you advertise the new product somewhere or is it more organic?
I'm trying to build a coaching and online course business but struggle with that first customer.