Let’s say you let your users submit feedback requests, and vote on which new features your team should build.

Users can vote with the click of a button, so collecting this data requires zero effort.

Andrew Rasmussen

Hi, I'm a co-founder of Canny. Before that, I was a software engineer at Facebook. I love JavaScript, rock climbing, nerding out about the future, and SaaS.

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The post The best way to collect user feedback first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post The best way to collect user feedback appeared first on Canny Blog.

The typical company responds to a feature request by saying “Thanks for your feedback, we’ve passed it on to the team.”

More times than not, the user never hears back again about their idea. They’re left to assume it was promptly forwarded to a room to be printed and fed to a paper shredder.

Or fed it to a cat.

We can do so much better.

At the end of the day, you grow your SaaS business by A) getting more customers, or B) delivering more value. A is the primary responsibility of the sales & marketing orgs, and B is owned by the product org.

How does the product org deliver more value? We all know this: by listening to your users.

So why then, when our users give us brilliant ideas on how we can deliver more value, improving our business and theirs, do we respond with the paper shredder reply?

This is one of the reasons we started Canny in the first place. Giving feedback to companies today is a bad experience. As a result, users are left feeling unheard and unloved, and companies are missing out on loads of valuable insight.

How can we do better?

People want transparency

When someone shares an idea with you, they really want to know two things. Are you going to build the feature I care about? If so, when? If not, why not?

By answering these two simple questions, people will be super impressed. This helps you stand out from every other SaaS company out there.

But how do we answer those questions? That’s the tricky part, and why most companies don’t bother.

When you’re a 1-2 person company, you’re likely a founder and therefore responsible for support, sales, and product. You already know if you’re going to build feature X, and when / why not. You can just tell them.

Customers will still be impressed, and this will help you stand out from your larger competitors.

Being transparent gets harder as you grow

But as team size grows, the customer-facing team and product org becomes more and more siloed. The support/sales person talking to the customer isn’t necessarily familiar with the product roadmap, and the decisions behind it.

For a 5 to 50 person company, the answer is usually just a quick conversation away. Modern messaging tools like Intercom make it really easy to loop in your colleagues from the product org, to get the info you need. A bit more friction, but still not bad.

For teams of hundreds or thousands people, transparency gets challenging. It might not be clear who the person is with the information you’re looking for. You might have to check-in with the marketing/PR team, to make sure you aren’t leaking a big, splashy launch.

A great way to solve this problem is to maintain internal product roadmaps. This way, your whole team can easily stay in touch with the improvements your product team is making.

This is why big companies are so bad at responding to user feedback. Because it’s a hard problem.

It’s a problem worth solving

Whether you’re a small team or a big team, it’s worth spending the extra effort to deliver a transparent response. It’ll impress your customers, which will pay dividends in brand loyalty and satisfaction.

The real moat in SaaS is brand

Almost every market leader has a really, really good competitor or 2 or even 3

That would honestly do the job just as well

— Jason Be Kind Lemkin  (@jasonlk) June 5, 2019

Another massive benefit is product adoption.

Every time someone requests a feature, keep track of that somewhere. Once you start building the feature, tell everyone who wants it that you’re building it. Once it’s ready to use, tell everyone who wants it that it’s ready to use.

Hint: Canny was built to do exactly this.

By doing this, you’re not only closing the feedback loop, but also driving adoption of your new feature. When people use more features, they get more value from your product, and are less likely to churn.

Churn is the #1 enemy of every SaaS company.

Never make a promise you can’t keep

You’ve almost definitely heard the expression “under promise, over deliver”.

This expression definitely applies to being transparent with your product roadmap.

You need to be careful that you aren’t transparent in a way that could be untrue. Otherwise you’re lying to your users, which is arguably worse than saying nothing at all. It’ll work against your brand, instead of for it.

Here’s a handy graphic for what your product team is thinking, and what that should translate to in a customer-facing promise.

The important takeaways from this are:

• Never tell a customer you’re going to ship a feature until you’re 99.9% sure the feature will ship. That means it’s either on the roadmap, or being worked on, and you trust your product team to deliver on what they say they will.
• Even once something is being worked on, always exaggerate the timeline. Engineering estimates are comically bad.

Find a time where you’re 99.9% sure the project will be complete by then. I find multiplying your estimate by 2x or 3x is typically safe, but it varies team to team.

The important thing is that you’re never lying to your customers, because this will work against you in the long run.

Build features that close deals

This process is a two-way street. Not only should your customer-facing folks ask your product team about the roadmap, they should help inform the product roadmap.

Let’s say you’re on a demo with a big enterprise lead. You’ve run through the product, and they like what they see.

You have X and Y, but are missing Z. What do you say?

Some founders / salespeople say “fake it till you make it”, and lie by saying they do have the Z. Don’t do this – if you’re caught lying, the deal’s definitely dead, and you lose trust in your company’s brand.

Here’s what you should say:

Again, you aren’t making any promises you can’t keep (some salespeople are known for doing this – don’t!).

Sometimes Z turns out to be a feature that you know a lot of other companies would be interested in, and your team has wanted to build it for a while. In this case, it’d be a no brainer to build it to close a big deal.

Break down silos in the name of transparency

The ideas in this post aren’t inherently complicated. Especially at a small company, being transparent is quite easy, and super worthwhile.

As the team grows, the hard part is that the customer-facing and product teams become siloed off from each other.

• Support is treated as a necessary cost center that should be reduced.
• Sales is focused on bringing in new business, and not really incentivized to talk to product.
• Product is too busy improving the product to meet with other teams.

But getting these teams to work together is critical. You’ll close more deals, your product team will be more informed, and your customers will definitely notice.

Andrew Rasmussen

Hi, I'm a co-founder of Canny. Before that, I was a software engineer at Facebook. I love JavaScript, rock climbing, nerding out about the future, and SaaS.

All Posts · Twitter

The post Managing customer expectations for new feature requests first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post Managing customer expectations for new feature requests appeared first on Canny Blog.

We started getting some strange emails in our inbox:

What’s this about? I plugged it into Google translate out of curiosity. It’s an automated response. The recipient is on vacation.

Cool, someone in China is trying Canny out! They invited a teammate to their team, and they’re on vacation. No big deal.

But then the next day I woke up to a dozen more emails like this:

Okay, what’s going on? If this many people are sending automated responses, how many emails are they sending?!

I did a quick database query to count teammate invites. My heart sank. They had sent 80k over the past week. Holy heck. We’re under attack. They’re programmatically sending thousands of HTTP requests which are resulting in us sending emails.

But why? Why would someone want to invite random people to their team on Canny? What’s in it for them? Are they just having fun? Ugh.

That’s what I thought at first. Then I took a look at one of the emails they sent:

That’s a weird company name. That doesn’t look legit at all.

I shared it with a teammate who can read Chinese. He instantly identified it as spam. They’re telling people to join a QQ group to get discounts on online gambling.

They’re using Canny to send people email spam. We pay to send their emails. We take the deliverability hit when people mark our emails as spam. Oh hell no, I don’t think so!

Stopping the Attack

We took a few immediate steps to stop the attack.

First, we deleted their Canny account. This way their requests would fail instead of triggering emails. We found a small handful of user and company accounts associated with this bad behavior. We removed them all.

Next, we blacklisted their IP address. They were sending every HTTP request from the same IP address. We simply added it to our blacklist in AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall). Their requests could no longer hit our servers.

At this point, they would have to create a new account, and use a different IP address to start the attack again. This isn’t too hard, but buys us time to think about how to avoid this attack in the long term.

Finding an 80/20 Solution

We’re an early-stage startup. We don’t have a team of security engineers to devote weeks to this. Every minute spent protecting ourselves is a minute that could have been spent on growth.

That’s why it was important that we find an 80/20 solution. Something good enough to make Canny an undesirable target, but nothing more. No over-engineering.

We put ourselves in the shoes of the attacker. We realized that picking which SaaS you want to send your email spam is a lot like picking which bike to steal.

Nicer bikes are more valuable, but have more protection. The thief must optimize for the nicest bike with the least amount of protection.

As long as your bike has at least as much protection as other similarly valued bikes, it won’t get stolen. This is because there are easier targets – the thief can make more money with less effort.

This makes it clear why early-stage SaaS apps are a target for email spammers: they’re an easier target. They have fewer resources to invest into security than big companies.

So how do we make our SaaS harder to attack?

1. Block Obvious Attacks From Email Spammers

Some behavior is obviously malicious. For example, someone sending requests faster than humanly possible. This can easily be blocked using rate-based rules in AWS WAF.

But you have to be careful. You don’t want to block a paying customer from doing something legitimate. You have to be thoughtful about what you can and can’t block.

We made a list of obviously bad behavior and blocked it all via either AWS WAF or our server application.

2. Better Awareness

The attack went on for several days before we even realized we were under attack. In that time they significantly ramped up volume. They probably thought we hadn’t noticed, so they could send more. They were right.

If we can immediately realize when we’re under attack, and act, this minimizes attacks. It also shows attackers we’re on to them. They’ll probably move on to another target then and there.

We created a new #fraud thread in Twist. We made a list of suspicious events, like a user sending more than 10 team invites in a day. Whenever this happens, the server pings our #fraud thread.

This behavior could be legit: maybe someone is inviting their entire team. That’s why we chose to send notifications for these events instead of outright blocking them. They warrant a quick manual review, but aren’t necessarily bad.

Andrew Rasmussen

Hi, I'm a co-founder of Canny. Before that, I was a software engineer at Facebook. I love JavaScript, rock climbing, nerding out about the future, and SaaS.

All Posts · Twitter

Lessons Learned

I hope you enjoyed our story. It was definitely unexpected and stressful, but we came out of it smarter and stronger.

If you work at an early-stage SaaS company, or someday want to, here’s a quick list of the most important takeaways:

• As an early-stage SaaS company, you are a target. You have less security than your larger peers. Think especially hard if you have a free tier/trial and send emails that contain user generated content.
• Awareness is crucial – know when you’re being attacked. Think about how people might attack you, and what would make you aware that it’s happening. It’ll probably only take a few minutes.
• Don’t over-engineer. It’s easy to dream up the perfect solution to every fraud problem you’ll ever have. Don’t. Your time is valuable. Find a solution that delivers 80% of the value in 20% of the time.

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to share some security best practices, leave a comment below!

Andrew Rasmussen

Hi, I'm a co-founder of Canny. Before that, I was a software engineer at Facebook. I love JavaScript, rock climbing, nerding out about the future, and SaaS.

All Posts · Twitter

The post Defending your early-stage SaaS startup against email spam first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post Defending your early-stage SaaS startup against email spam appeared first on Canny Blog.

Offices are expensive – you may as well be paying rent twice. In the early-stage, you just don’t need one.

In the past year we’ve grown our startup to be ramen profitable and hired our first remote teammates. Still growing. Still no office. Still no plans on changing that.

We’re also traveling the world. We’ve visited and worked full-time from 20 cities in 14 countries and 3 continents. We work from work-friendly cafes or whichever Airbnb we’re staying at.

Before that we lived in San Francisco, also working from cafes. Whether you’re living in a big city, traveling, or something in between, you don’t need an office to be productive.

Tell your brain it’s work time

Hey Brain, it’s work time, so let’s get some work done!

That’ll work just about as well as “Hey Brain, it’s exercise time, so let’s go to the gym!”

Sometimes it works, but sometimes your brain says “I’m tired” and decides staying on the couch is a better idea. More often than not, your brain is actually the one telling you what to feel and do.

But there are some tricks you can use to get yourself into work mode.

Namely, your brain associates places with activities. That’s why working from bed is a terrible idea. It’ll tell your brain that your bed is for working and sleeping. This leads to sleepy work sessions and stressful sleep sessions. Nobody wants that.

Find a specific room or desk at home and only use it for working. Then your brain will associate being there with being productive. If you get distracted, leave your productive space. This way you don’t let your brain associate it with unproductiveness.

Enough about brains.

“Go to work”

Working from home is definitely a luxury. You don’t have to commute. You can spend more time with your family. You get to work from the comfort of your own home.

But be careful you don’t get too comfortable. Don’t just roll out of bed and hop on your laptop.

What I mean by this is, mentally, you still have to “go to work”. Take a shower, get dressed, eat breakfast. Whatever your morning routine is for going into the office, do that for working at home too.

Otherwise, your sleepy morning and productive work session meld together. This makes for an unproductive, stressful mess. Find that separation. Do your morning routine. Mentally go to work. In this case, that means your productive space at home.

Andrew Rasmussen

Hi, I'm a co-founder of Canny. Before that, I was a software engineer at Facebook. I love JavaScript, rock climbing, nerding out about the future, and SaaS.

All Posts · Twitter

Get out of the house

If you don’t have a space you can dedicate to productivity, or home doesn’t work for you, it’s no problem. Get out of the house!

Luckily there are about a million work-friendly cafes out there. It’s totally normal and appropriate to spend several hours working at a cafe. Many of them specifically have Wi-Fi and outlets to encourage workers to visit.

There’s definitely unwritten etiquette though. Most of it is straightforward if you aren’t a jerk. For starters:

• You must purchase something for every 2-3 hours you stay there. Otherwise they’re losing money on you. A cafe is a business, just like yours.
• Only take up one seat to save space for others. Especially if it’s crowded.
• If they specifically say they aren’t laptop-friendly, then don’t work there.

There are also several criteria that make a cafe a good place to work:

• Good Wi-Fi. Without fast Wi-Fi, you probably can’t do your job. Some cafes have a 30 minute limit for how long you can use the Wi-Fi. Avoid these cafes.
• Power Outlets. Imagine you’re in the middle of some hard work when that “3% battery remaining” window pops up. Nothing is worse!
• Seating. The best cafes can get quite crowded because, well, they’re awesome to visit and work from. Make sure they have plenty of seating or you get there early.
• Good Coffee/Tea. This one isn’t a must have, but is definitely a nice to have. A delicious beverage can make you look forward to going to work.
• Good Food. It’s hard to work for more than 3-4 hours without at least eating a snack. Food means you can stay even longer, and not feel bad about that because you’ve ordered a drink and a meal.
• Hours. Is it open every day of the week? Early mornings? Evenings? Late nights?

If you can find a cafe that checks all these boxes, it’s a keeper. Make it your go-to spot and head there a few times a week while you explore and find other great places.

I’ve also had success working from libraries and even fancy hotel lobbies. Hotel lobbies usually have Wi-Fi, a cafe, bathrooms, and don’t mind you stopping by for a few hours. Some of them are super nice!

It’s actually mind-blowing how much impact going to a cafe can have. Just today I was sitting at home thinking about what to write about, and I didn’t feel like working. My mind was cloudy, and it felt like I was pushing a boulder up a hill.

I hopped in the shower, got dressed, and biked to a cafe. I ordered an iced mango green tea (in Chinese, because we’re in Taiwan). I sat down at a big table with a bunch of other people working away.

The difference was night and day. Getting out of the house, “going to work”, and being around productive people made working 10x easier. I brainstormed 15 blog post topics and wrote this post in a few hours.

If you ever feel like you’re having a bad day, it’s not too late to turn it around. Changing up your environment can make all the difference.

Try some of these awesome tools

We’ve compiled a list of awesome tools that our team uses to stay focused.

• Noise canceling headphones. At a noisy cafe? Trying to tell your roommates you’re busy? Disconnect from distractions.
• Spotify. Listen to music without lyrics. The “Focus” mood in Spotify is your new best friend.
• Qbserve. The metrics you track are the ones that go up. If you keep track of how much time you spend working, you’ll work more. Simple as that.
• Do Not Disturb. I had an iPhone for 2 years before I knew this feature existed. It’s super useful to unplug from the daily ongoings.
• Twist. We use Twist as our team communication app. They have a nifty “Snooze” feature that ignores all notifications for a set amount of time.
• Forest. Plant trees by not visiting distracting websites / apps for a certain amount of time. It’s a cute, fun way to game productivity.
• Healthier. Don’t forget to take breaks too! We take two minute breaks every half hour.

Keep the momentum going

It can be demotivating to work hard and not see any results. Regardless of your environment, you need to know that you’re working hard for a reason.

That’s why momentum is so important. It creates a positive loop: work hard, ship, get results, celebrate, repeat.

Without results, work can feel like a drag. So break your work into smaller projects, ship often, and celebrate your results!

You’ll notice that we aren’t even talking about offices anymore. Productivity tools, celebrating results… these things have nothing to do with working from an office. Productivity is more about your mindset and workflow than needing a physical office. So save your money, make life a little more interesting, and go explore some cool cafes! 

We post about our daily adventures in work and travel on our Instagram stories @carryoncode. To read more about our journey as digital nomads, check out this post.

Andrew Rasmussen

Hi, I'm a co-founder of Canny. Before that, I was a software engineer at Facebook. I love JavaScript, rock climbing, nerding out about the future, and SaaS.

All Posts · Twitter

The post How to be productive without an office first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post How to be productive without an office appeared first on Canny Blog.

It’s officially been a year since we launched our SaaS startup, Canny. We’re proud of how far we’ve come, but we’d definitely do some things differently. I’ll share the highlights of our journey so far, and some of our biggest learning lessons.

In case you don’t know already, Canny is a user feedback tool. We help software companies track feedback to build better products.

Happy Birthday, Canny! 

The Journey

In the past year, Sarah and I:

• Launched Canny on Product Hunt. We got thousands of website visits, 350+ trial sign-ups, and a few dozen paying customers. Huge win!
• Moved out of our cozy apartment in San Francisco to become digital nomads. We lived and worked from 14 cities in 10 countries: US, Canada, UK, France, Hungary, Germany, Spain, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Thailand.
• Got 142 paying customers. This includes several leading companies like Flexport, MongoDB, Compass, and Bench.
• Grew Canny from $0 to over $100k ARR. About 80% of that is profit, which means we can afford to start hiring fantastic people!
• Started hiring a remote team. We’re hiring a Content Marketer and a Full-Stack Engineer. We’re up to our necks in applicants and we’ve done a dozen or so interviews.
• Raised $0. We’re bootstrapped and proud – no outside funding needed.

What a year! Can’t wait to see what the next one has in store for us.

Lessons Learned

Here are the top 5 things we wish we could go back and do differently. We’ve come a long way, but there’s so much room for improvement.

1. Identify what kind of SaaS you are

There are two major SaaS sales models: low-touch and high-touch.

Low-touch SaaS is about volume.

• Your product costs $10 to $500 per month
• People need very little interaction with your team to become customers
• Your landing page call-to-action is “Sign up for a free trial”
• Your primary growth channel is marketing

High-touch SaaS is about building a sales engine.

• Your product costs north of $6k per year
• People talk to your sales team to learn about and purchase your product
• Your landing page call-to-action is “Request a demo”
• Your primary growth channel is sales

The reason you should pick one (to start out with) is that it focuses you. If you sell to a specific type of customer, in a specific way, it simplifies everything. Which features you build, how your pricing works, what you optimize your landing page for, and more.

Rather than doing alright at both, you can be excellent at one. Startups don’t win by being alright, they win by being excellent.

2. Simplify everything

You can simplify more than just your sales model. You should strive to simplify everything your users interact with. From the top of the funnel to the bottom: your content, ads, landing page, pricing, onboarding, product, and more.

People are busy. They have short attention spans. They’re constantly being targeted by thousands of corporate agendas. If you make something the slightest bit difficult, they won’t take the time to figure it out. They’ll drop off. They’ll stop reading your blog post. They’ll close your landing page. They’ll quit using your product.

But if you make it easy, they’re far more likely to engage. And they’ll remember that “Canny is easy to use”. Just like they remember that “dealing with Comcast is my worst nightmare”. In the early days, you need loyal fans. You need people to love your company, otherwise growth will be an eternal grind.

We wouldn’t have the traction we do today if we hadn’t focused on simplicity. Customers regularly reach out, telling us they love how straightforward our product is. Blog readers mention how our writing is easy to read. This translates into more awareness, trials, customers, and inevitably success.

3. Prioritize marketing

Since we’re low-touch SaaS, marketing is our primary method of acquiring new customers. Yet we only spent about 5-10% of our time on marketing last year. Not nearly enough.

Part of the problem is that Sarah and I are a designer and engineer. Building product is what we enjoy doing, and what we’re best at. That’s why we spent so much time on product.

Yet in October when we wrote a blog post about how we got to ramen profitability, our trial sign-ups doubled. That’s right, doubled. Our trial-to-paid conversion rate stayed constant, meaning we grew twice as fast that month. From a single blog post.

Why aren’t we doing this all the time?! Because it’s hard. Because we aren’t good at it. Because it doesn’t feel natural.

Excuses. If you’re looking to only do what you’re good at, don’t start a company. Dedicate time to what will move the needle, not what’s comfortable. You’ll learn a heck of a lot this way too.

4. Narrow your target audience

This is our first time running a SaaS company. In the early days, we were happy just to have paying customers. We sold to anyone we could: consumer apps, open source, SaaS, marketplaces, games, and more. We didn’t really see it as a problem.

More customers = More money = We’re doing better. Right?

Wrong. The problem is that it makes your product and messaging unfocused. Our consumer customers need different features than our SaaS customers. They also resonate with different messaging on our landing page and in our product. By trying to serve both, we did a worse job than serving either one alone.

The consumer customers ended up churning more. It turns out that feedback is more valuable to SaaS companies because it drives revenue. We’ve since narrowed our focus.

Of course, hindsight is always 20-20. We didn’t know who we should sell to until we tried selling to everyone. If you don’t know who your target audience should be, you don’t understand your users well enough. Get out of your office and talk to them.

5. Ruthlessly manage your time

In a startup, there’s an endless list of things you could spend your time doing. How do you most efficiently spend your time?

The worst part is that many activities feel productive but really aren’t. Take email, for example. If every time you get an email, you drop what you’re doing to deal with it, you’ll spend your entire day on email. Obviously, falling behind is a problem, but you can dedicate chunks of time to work through it. Context switches are expensive.

Another culprit is building features that aren’t mission critical. Sometimes a customer asks for a feature, and it’s tempting to say “we’ll have it done today”. We’ve done this many times.

We wanted to impress people and deliver value as fast as possible. It felt right, but we ended up building a lot of features that weren’t useful to many people. This wasn’t an efficient use of time. It’s much better to pick one high-level strategy, and patiently execute it.

The best way to solve this is to set measurable goals. What is your team trying to accomplish this year, half, quarter, and month? What must be done to hit these goals? What can I work on today that will move the needle the most? Thinking this way helps you make unbiased decisions about how to spend your time. Otherwise, you’re just acting in the heat of the moment: inefficiently.

Be helpful

On top of these 5 things, remember that you are in the business of helping people. The reason people buy your product is because it solves their problem. The reason people read your blog is because they want to learn something and be more successful.

The more you can get in the mindset of helping others, the better your company will do. I wrote this article because I think it would have been insanely valuable to read a year ago. I hope it helps you now.

This past year has been a blast, and we look forward to many more. We’ll keep sharing what we learn as we go.

Andrew Rasmussen

Hi, I'm a co-founder of Canny. Before that, I was a software engineer at Facebook. I love JavaScript, rock climbing, nerding out about the future, and SaaS.

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The post Year in review: Lessons learned from bootstrapping our SaaS startup first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post Year in review: Lessons learned from bootstrapping our SaaS startup appeared first on Canny Blog.

This is far less money than we made working at Facebook, but a huge milestone for our bootstrapped startup. We’ve eliminated one of the biggest risks of failure: running out of money.

In this post I’ll cover how we got here, and what we’ve learned.

How we found our burning problem

I won’t bore you with generic advice. You’ve heard it a thousand times. Solve a burning problem! Make something people want! Great advice, but not super actionable.

Instead, I’ll share how we found our burning problem.

We actually started with a problem of our own, then pivoted to a more valuable one.

Our original problem

We followed Paul Graham’s advice and started with a problem we had ourselves:

As users, it doesn’t feel like companies listen to our feedback. They’ll say “thanks, we’ll pass it on to the team”, but nothing ever happens. This is demoralizing. Apps are buggy and missing useful features. Fixing them would mean making all software experiences better.

We built a community where people could post and vote on feedback for any product, publicly.

Around 5,000 people posted and voted on ideas for several hundred products. It was a neat beta, but retention was weak. It was difficult to get teams to subscribe to feedback about their product.

Learning Lesson: We kind of just assumed our problem was valid and started building the product. We should have talked to more people first. It would have saved us months. We would have realized it wasn’t something people really needed or would pay for.

MRR: $0 (Oct, 2016)

The bigger problem

We starting talking to a ton of teams about user feedback.

• How do you collect feedback from your users?
• How do you keep track of user feedback?
• How do you decide what to build?

It turns out there’s a reason it doesn’t feel like companies are listening to our feedback. It’s because they aren’t.

It’s not that they don’t care. They care deeply. It’s just that feedback is a mess. Product managers don’t have time to read every chat message, email, and support ticket. And even if they did, they wouldn’t remember it all.

This is when we realized there was a business problem causing our consumer problem.

To validate our new findings, we built a widget to help teams collect and keep track of user feedback.

I still remember the first time someone paid us $19/mo for it. We were ecstatic. It was the first time we’d ever sold something we built. The best part: they’re still using us today, a year later.

Learning Lesson: Talking to people is a great way to discover and validate problems. Writing code isn’t. Charging money is the ultimate form of validation. If a total stranger pays for your product, they must think you’re solving some problem for them.

MRR: $100 (Dec, 2016)

Understanding our value proposition

At this point, we knew what we had to do: fork the repo and re-market our community as a SaaS tool.

Sarah’s a product designer and I’m a software engineer. Building the MVP was the easy part.

But how do you make a landing page? What words go on it? How do you price it?

These are sales and marketing problems that we had never faced before. The way to solve these problems, we learned, is to understand your value proposition:

• What problem do you solve?
• Who has that problem?
• How do they describe the problem?
• How big of a problem is it?
• How much would they pay for a solution?
• What other solutions are out there?
• How are you better / different?

Without answers to these questions, you’re just guessing.

Learning Lesson: Sales and marketing is about understanding the problem you solve, and clearly communicating that. If you’re struggling with them, you may not understand your value proposition. We spent a lot of time reading blog posts about sales and marketing. We should have spent that time talking to our target customer.

MRR: $100 (Mar, 2017)

Launching our MVP

We started with a soft launch to the teams already using us.

When we shipped our pivot, we were able to migrate everyone over from the old site. The core product was similar enough.

This was a great way to get a bunch of people trying our “paid” product from day one. We let it run for a week or two, worked out the kinks, then launched on Product Hunt.

Our launch went amazing. Over 350 companies tried Canny that week. Dozens ended up paying after our 30-day trial.

Several factors played into our successful launch:

• We solve a problem for software companies. Product Hunt’s community is mainly people working in tech. This audience was highly relevant for us.
• We emailed the 5,000 people who had left feedback in our community. We let them know about our pivot, and that we were launching on Product Hunt.
• We already had a few paying customers. This meant we knew we had something other people would pay for too.
• Chris Messina hunted us. Thanks Chris! (he has a form where you can ask him to hunt you too)

Learning Lesson: If you sell to tech companies, Product Hunt is a great place to launch. It’s a one-time trigger, not your marketing strategy. If you do it sooner, you’ll get valuable feedback. If you do it later, you’ll get paying customers. I’m glad we did it later.

MRR: $1,000 (May, 2017)

Building an Inbound Engine

We’re coming up on 100 paying customers, and we’ve never done any outbound sales. Our strongest channel is organic, via “Powered by Canny”.

This is one of the huge benefits of building a user-facing SaaS product. By user-facing, I mean our product is used by our customers’ customers.

Thousands of people use our product every day. Some percentage of those people are PMs or founders, and have the problem we solve. They then sign up for Canny, wanting to use it for their own product.

This channel is boosted by the fact that my co-founder Sarah is a super talented designer. Several of our customers have switched from competitors specifically for our design.

Since we already had a bunch of inbound traffic, we’ve spent most of our time iterating on our funnel:

• Landing Page → Pricing Page: Iterated on and simplified our landing page. Experimented with the headline. Included key features.
• Pricing Page → Register Page: Changed and simplified our pricing. Added a slider to remove anxiety around scaling pricing.
• Register Page → Free Trial: Simplified our registration forms.
• Free Trial → Using Trial: Added user onboarding to encourage key actions. Made it easier to integrate.
• Using Trial → Paying: Created a drip campaign in Intercom to encourage key actions. Added billing reminders.
• Paying → Retained: Offering friendly, prompt customer service. Nurturing to make sure people are getting value. Promptly fixing bugs + building features where it makes sense. Adding sticky integrations like Slack + Zapier.

As a result, our funnel has gotten pretty darn good, and most months our churn is zero. We’ve been able to more than triple in just a few months, from our organic channel.

Learning Lesson: Start marketing earlier. Write less code. Since we’re an engineer + designer, we constantly fall back into a “product mindset”. Features are great, but they usually aren’t the most optimal way to drive your business.

MRR: $3,500 (Oct, 2017)

Umm, how do you live on $3,500?

If you live in San Francisco, you’re probably wondering how $3,500/mo is anywhere near ramen profitability.

Four months ago we moved out of our cozy apartment in San Francisco to be digital nomads. Right now we’re in Valencia, Spain. We’re also a couple.

We’ll split an Airbnb for $1,000 a month, work from cafes, and eat cheaply. Canny spends hundreds a month, mostly on hosting and other SaaS.

Learning Lesson: If you can get away with it, you can save a lot of money working nomad. As long as you have Wi-Fi, you can work anywhere. We’re actually more productive working remotely because we don’t know as many people. All we do is eat, sleep, work, and explore.

Intrigued? Check out our travel Instagram or read Sarah’s post, Building our Startup as Digital Nomads.

Next Up After Our Ramen Profitability Milestone

We’ve built a solid engine that converts visitors into paying customers. It’s time to switch gears and focus on traffic.

• Blogging: Seems to work well for SaaS companies like ours. We love what Eoghan says about content: the less you try to make it convert, the better it does. We’re focusing on posts that benefit our target customer, rather than trying to sell Canny.
• Advertising: We’ve begun experimenting with FB + Google ads. Turning $X into $Y seems like a no brainer if Y > X.
• Side Projects: There’s this idea that you can build a useful product, and give it away for free. For example, Front built reallygoodemails.com. If done right, these projects can be huge business drivers. We’re product people, so this lets us do what we do best.

We’ll let you know how it goes in our next post! Thanks for reading.

Andrew Rasmussen

Hi, I'm a co-founder of Canny. Before that, I was a software engineer at Facebook. I love JavaScript, rock climbing, nerding out about the future, and SaaS.

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The post How we Bootstrapped our SaaS Startup to Ramen Profitability first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post How we Bootstrapped our SaaS Startup to Ramen Profitability appeared first on Canny Blog.

For those of you thinking about doing the next batch, we’d love to share our experience with you. We also have ideas for how YC could do even better.

The Program

The founder track had 3,000 companies from 141 countries. This was split into 94 groups. Each group got the pleasure to work with a YC alumni mentor — someone who has founded a YC startup in the past.

We were part of group 18 and our mentor was Boris Jabes, founder of Meldium and all around awesome guy .

Office Hours

Our group had office hours on a weekly basis. Since founders were from all over the world, these were held in a group video chat. Each company spent 5–10 minutes asking for advice on our hardest problems. Boris gave most of the advice, but it wasn’t uncommon for other founders to chime in too.

Video Lessons

A new lesson was released on YouTube every week. Here’s a list of them all, in the order they came out:

• How and Why to Start A Startup (Sam Altman, Dustin Moskovitz)
• Startup Mechanics (Kirsty Nathoo)
• How to Get Ideas and How to Measure (Stewart Butterfield, Adam D’Angelo)
• How to Build a Product I (Michael Seibel, Emmett Shear, Steve Huffman)
• How to Build a Product II (Aaron Levie)
• How to Build a Product III (Jason Lemkin, Solomon Hykes, Tracy Young, Harry Zhang)
• How to Build a Product IV (Jan Koum)
• How to Get Users and Grow (Alex Schultz)
• How to Invent the Future I (Alan Kay)
• How to Invent the Future II (Alan Kay)
• How to Find Product Market Fit (Peter Reinhardt)
• How to Think About PR (Sharon Pope)
• Diversity & Inclusion at Early Stage Startups
• How to Build and Manage Teams (Vinod Khosla, Anu Hariharan)
• How to Raise Money, and How to Succeed Long-Term (Jess Lee, Aaron Harris, Ali Rowghani)

These videos are incredible. They’ve managed to pack decades of the best startup advice into 15 hours. Delivered from some of the biggest names in tech. For free. Stop reading this and go watch them instead!

Weekly Metrics

Every Tuesday we had to submit our updated metrics, including week over week growth. This held us accountable.

If they went down, it sucked and motivated us to do better. If they went up, it gave us a reason to celebrate.

Obviously every startup should do this anyway. But like A/B testing, it probably doesn’t happen as much as it should.

Networking

We got the pleasure to meet some inspiring founders, like John Saddington. He’s been blogging for 16 years and had so much to teach us about producing content. He’s also a productivity master—raising two daughters and starting a company, all while vlogging every day.

Here’s John’s video from the day he met Sarah:

Having a great network is like steroids for your startup. It makes it easier to do sales, marketing, recruiting, fundraising, and more. This is mostly because people are so much more willing to meet with you if someone they know introduces you.

Startup School was filled with smart, motivated people. We’re lucky to have gotten to know some of them.

Live Office Hours

YC ran three sessions of “Live Office Hours”, where they had YC partners give founders advice. These were recorded and posted publicly to YouTube. (sessions one, two, and three)

Sarah and I were very lucky to be one of the nine startups who were interviewed. The partners who interviewed us were Yuri Sagalov and Sam Altman. Not only did we get one-on-one time with tremendous people, over ten thousand people watched it.

For months after this video was posted, our Intercom was filled with messages like this:

This is from someone who is now a paying customer! Doing live office hours turned out to be great inbound marketing for us, particularly because we sell to startups.

Only 9 out of 3,000 startups got the opportunity to do live office hours, so we were really lucky . Other startups will still get some inbound / awareness from the presentation videos.

Feedback for YC

This was the first batch of Startup School. The first time is never perfect, but it went pretty well. We have some ideas for how they could do it even better next time.

We wish we were grouped with other companies in our space (B2B/SaaS).
It seemed like the groups were arranged randomly. Our group had companies working on AI, VR, education, energy, and much more. While the diversity was cool and interesting, it didn’t always feel like the best use of our time.

The metrics form was confusing.
The form isn’t accessible anymore, otherwise we’d include a screenshot. It was unclear whether we were supposed to submit the total metric, or the weekly change. We filled out the wrong thing multiple times. Adding an example, or doing a content pass, would be appreciated.

Having over twenty people in a video chat was insane.
Each team got 5 minutes to talk to Boris while the rest of us listened. We didn’t even get to talk because time went over. It was low value and a bad first impression.

After week one, a few teams dropped off and we split into two separate calls (one morning, one evening). We ended up with about 6 people per chat, which felt a lot better. Ideally, it’d be this way from the start.

Since the experience got better by week two, we’re confident the next cohort will be a breeze.

Thanks!

Huge thanks to Group 18, Boris Jabes, and Y Combinator. We’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Andrew Rasmussen

Hi, I'm a co-founder of Canny. Before that, I was a software engineer at Facebook. I love JavaScript, rock climbing, nerding out about the future, and SaaS.

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The post What you’ll get out of Y Combinator’s Startup School first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post What you’ll get out of Y Combinator’s Startup School appeared first on Canny Blog.

This can be a daunting task, especially as you scale. How do you keep track of who wants what? How do you encourage more feedback, without it becoming overwhelming?

These problems are what inspired us to build Canny, a simple way for your team to stay on top of user feedback.

How it works

So many companies still collect feedback via email, live chat, or Zendesk tickets. Imagine the time it takes to process hundreds of conversations and respond to hundreds of emails. Canny helps you stay on top of user feedback while spending your time valuably instead.

Ask your users a simple question like “Which features should we build?”

Check back later, and voilà:

A board is a place where your users can post and vote on ideas for a specific topic (eg. feature requests). Other popular topics include bug reports, blog topics, and FAQs. Boards can be public or private — some teams use boards to keep track of feedback internally.

You can follow up with comments or change the status of a post to “in-progress” or “complete”. The beauty is that only the people who voted on the post get notified.

Make informed product decisions

We aren’t trying to automate product management. Just because your users ask for something doesn’t mean you should build it. You still need to decide which features align with your mission and key metrics. Feedback helps you be more informed in this process.

Canny was designed to help your team answer questions like:

• What are the top 5 most requested features?
• Which customers care about feature X?
• Coming Soon: What do paying customer want most? (via segment filters)

Without answering these questions, how can you be confident in your product decisions?

Building a product without listening to your users is like spelunking without a headlamp. It won’t get you through the cave, but it sure does make the journey easier.

Give Canny a shot

Clearly we love feedback so try it out and let us know what you think.

Andrew Rasmussen

Hi, I'm a co-founder of Canny. Before that, I was a software engineer at Facebook. I love JavaScript, rock climbing, nerding out about the future, and SaaS.

All Posts · Twitter

The post Introducing Canny first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post Introducing Canny appeared first on Canny Blog.

Overview

The target audience of this survey was software engineers, designers, and others who are involved in building tech products. Of respondents who gave demographic information, 73% were software engineers and 14% were designers.

There were 172 responses to our survey.

Raw Results

In this post I’m going to summarize and discuss the results of the survey. You can check out the raw results here.

Frustrating Experiences

The majority of the feedback Sarah and I come up with is inspired by a frustrating product experience. An app is missing a useful feature, doesn’t work as expected, or has an unnecessarily high friction UX flow. As product creators, our brains are wired to think about how we’d make this experience better.

Therefore the first part of our survey aimed to learn whether others experience this frustration and if so, how often. We also wanted to dig into what people typically do when it happens.

• 88% of respondents get frustrated when products don’t work properly or are missing a useful feature.
• 56% experience this frustration at least weekly, 75% at least monthly.
• 63% of respondents who get frustrated feel motivated to do something about it.

So a big chunk of people share our regular frustration and motivation to do something about it. What do people typically do when they have a frustrating experience?

Half of frustrated respondents typically do nothing about their frustrations. What’s really interesting is that of the respondents who said they typically do nothing, 45% of them also said they are motivated to do something. So you’ve got a big chunk of respondents who do get frustrated, are motivated to do something about it, and then do nothing.

We are not surprised by this because this is exactly how we feel. We rarely submit feedback because we have huge doubts about whether it’ll ever be seen by somebody who actually works on the product. While a lot of people do reach out, there’s definitely a huge room for improvement.

Ideas to Improve

The next section focuses on feedback. Do people have feedback? Do people give it to companies? How is their experience giving feedback?

• 90% of respondents have ideas for how the products they use could be improved.
• 61% of respondents who do have ideas rarely or never reach out to companies.

So people generally do have ideas but don’t often reach out. How is the experience of giving feedback?

Respondents generally disagree or at best feel mixed about companies handling their feedback well. Responses were largely negative and showed significant room for improvement.

To me, this explains why so many people choose not to reach out to companies… because giving feedback typically feels like writing into a vacuum. You usually don’t even know if anybody saw it, much less if it had any real impact on the product’s roadmap. Why take the time to submit feedback if you aren’t confident whether it will even be seen?

Community

Feedback is usually a one-on-one conversation between the user and the company. You email, write a review, or tweet at them and they (sometimes) respond. You rarely get to see how many other users agree with your feedback or what feedback others have for the products you use.

The next section aims to understand whether people benefit from community when giving feedback. 

• 82% of respondents are curious about what others think about their feedback.
• 76% are interested in the feedback others have about the products they use.
• 80% would be willing to write feedback publicly if great feedback were rewarded.

It’s tough to say how much value people would get out of a community but you can conclude that many people are at least somewhat curious about the feedback others have and what others think about their own feedback.

The Motivation Behind Giving Feedback

We predicted that many people would report having feedback, but would not give it because giving feedback is currently a very discouraging experience. This next section digs into what type of rewards would motivate people to give more feedback.

It’s interesting that the company responding quickly and transparently is more motivating than straight up giving people money. Alongside the fact that most respondents don’t feel like companies offer transparency or respond quickly, it’s no wonder people don’t give feedback very often… the most motivating rewards are not the norm.

Many large companies have a bug bounty program that rewards white hat security researchers with money and public mentions for identifying vulnerabilities. Why doesn’t great product feedback get similar treatment? It can have a similarly large impact on a company’s business.

Takeaways

Overall I feel like other people are feeling the same pain points we are.

• Despite products working pretty well, many people still get frustrated on a regular basis and have ideas for how to make apps better.
• People rarely do anything with these ideas because giving feedback currently feels like writing into a vacuum, you usually get a discouraging generic response and it’s unclear whether your feedback is valued or will have any impact on the product roadmap.
• There are many things companies could do better to make giving feedback a better experience and to solve the frustrations people are feeling on a regular basis. They aren’t really doing them. These things include responding quickly and transparently.
• People desire transparency and to be involved in the product development process.

We have some ideas on how to drastically improve the user feedback experience, both on the giving and the receiving side. These results were pretty encouraging that we’re on the right track. We’ll be sure to share more about what we’re building soon!

Thanks

Thank you for reading to the end of this post and caring about user feedback. If you submitted a response to our survey then thanks for that! We really do appreciate you taking the time.

Andrew Rasmussen

Hi, I'm a co-founder of Canny. Before that, I was a software engineer at Facebook. I love JavaScript, rock climbing, nerding out about the future, and SaaS.

All Posts · Twitter

Andrew Rasmussen

Hi, I'm a co-founder of Canny. Before that, I was a software engineer at Facebook. I love JavaScript, rock climbing, nerding out about the future, and SaaS.

All Posts · Twitter

The post Why you don’t like giving feedback first appeared on Canny Blog.

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