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.
100 people, that's a lot. How do you get to such a number?