sandeep45

Check out this interview of startup CEO, Jordan Boesch @7shifts. He talks about customer onboarding, user feedback, and customer retention: http://blog.listenloop.com/customer-onboarding-best-practices-with-jordan-boesch

Watch the full video or skim the audio transcription about customer onboarding in this post.

Here’s a quick recap: – Jordan took us back several years to explain how he built 7shifts as a side-project until it grew to sustain his full-time attention.

– Jordan discussed how he acquired and trained users in the early days without a customer onboarding checklist.

– Jordan mentioned his customer onboarding best practices, like sending behavior-based emails and soliciting user feedback within his SaaS application.

Hello. My name is Sandeep, and I'm the cofounder of FeatureKicker. As a developer, I have built many features. Many of them were a waste of everyone's time. I built FeatureKicker so we can "make something people want" instead of software that sucks.

We're applying to YC W2014, and we'd love your feedback on our application: docs.google.com/document/d/1kv_Rgr4-y9wvrOxwZdTevhW-r-i5pktUBcw6t0ufazY

Give it to us straight. We've got thick skins.

-- UPDATE -- CRAP! Looks like we exceeded Google Docs' max number of concurrent viewers. Here's our application on Tumblr: startupsthehardway.tumblr.com/post/63091956854/featurekickers-yc-w2014-application

As a developer, I have built many features. I wouldn’t say all, but many of them were a waste of everyones time. These features were usually built because the product group told us to build them. I found product teams make these decisions based upon some customer interviews, email feedbacks, phone complains and mostly their “gut”. And its hurts the most when we would bust our asses building and releasing it, to only realize that our customers are not using it. Reasons vary from customers wanting X and we building Y to the user flow not being right. Its further disappointing to learn after a release that customers didn’t even care enough to click on the feature i built, forget about using it.

Prioritizing what to build, which features to double down on and which ones to ignore, what to prototype and what to scrap etc. are all important questions which the product team needs to decide. In their defense I feel like these are difficult questions. To me its just that I don't think they can afford to get this wrong. Building the wrong features, maintaining them and then eventually killing them is very expensive and just a moral killer.

The question in my mind is can product teams make better product decisions? Why do we have to ask developers to build things, release it and then learn whether customers really wanted it. To address this issue and empower product teams I have built www.featureKicker.com. It enables teams to deploy features before building them, collect feedback, analyze data and make better, more informed, data backed decisions. It enables a product manager to look a developer in his or her eye and say “I need you to build X and I need it done by Y. I have Z number of customers waiting for it. Here you can read what they have to say”.

I would love to hear from the community of what they think of this solution. I want to help companies make better product decisions and am looking at the community for guidance.

Sandeep CTO FeatureKicker.com

Hi, I have a startup and can not afford my own personal short code. I decided to use my Google Voice Number to receive SMS messages and have my app read them and then respond to them. It seems to work fine, but I am wondering if anyone has any experience doing this? Any possible issues or things or alternatives I should be aware of.