It is definitely something different, and a different framing on some existing activities. But the same way that engineering roles change, non-engineering roles also change in focus and title and expectations.
Thanks for the feedback about that chapter, will dive in and see if we can try to make the answer more clear!
That's not a fair characterization of the guide at all. Did you even read it?
There's tons of useful information (fully available on the website, no need to download) for anybody who's building / working with a customer success team for the first time, which is much of the audience on HN.
And yes, our "marketing" is trying to be generous with our knowledge and experience. That doesn't mean it isn't useful.
The parent comment wasn't flattering, but it also wasn't unfair.
I did not read the guide, but did read the titles and summary info looking for the section that outlines the solution to the problem that is presented. It was not there. If it was, none of the titles indicated that it was. Given how nicely the guide is presented, I'm confident that the answer is not there. No need to read the guide.
(FYI - I’m the co-founder of Arrows, which created this guide)
In our time building and working at startups, we came to realize customer success was a secret weapon that’s massively overlooked and underfunded. If you use customer success properly, it’s the core tool that helps you get to the SaaS holy grail of negative churn.
The first employee we hired after raising money this year was our customer success advisor, Shareil Nariman. And he’s who wrote this guide which is fully published on the site. Just a small way we hoped to use the benefit of having funding to give back to the community.
> customer success was a secret weapon that’s massively overlooked and underfunded.
You are right about its importance, of course, but why do you say it is overlooked and underfunded? Almost everyone I know acknowledges that it is critical to success, and it get serious focus.
Because even though tons of people think customer success is important and give it focus, we talk to startups every week who are still under-resourcing it and not giving their team the right focus... even though they'd tell you they believe in the impact of customer success.
Thanks so much! The team is thrilled with how it turned out... and our first marketing hire doesn't start until next week, so this was a bit of a grind.
We looked at Clearbit's and Productboard's ebooks, frankly. And then we worked with a designer on the PDF itself: http://nonfik.com/studio
Not a problem if your colleague is skeptical, we'll have time to convince them. What type of role are they in?
Integrations will come. But for now every tool which stores contacts or spreadsheets has a CSV export. It's usually just one click to export, and uploading to Arrows Outreach is immediate.
So I'd hope they'd give it a shot if they have the problem we had, which is jumping back and forth between spreadsheets and Gmail to send personalized emails to a large list.
I designed and built this over the past week after a freelance project fell through. The idea came to me the Friday night before the election, and I figured would be fun to build over a few days.
Right now I'm keeping things small and simple: What are the best products you and your Twitter friends have bought on Amazon recently? Hope you dig it.
Three quick thoughts for you which should hopefully help:
1) Double your prices! They're so cheap! The service is so useful, saves dev and support time, etc. Worth more. ($12, $24, $49 is still crazy cheap.)
2) Yearly plans, especially for businesses. A lot of people will want to expense an entire year and get reimbursed (which is annoying monthly).
3) Add at least one more plan that's something like $199 or $349 or something that feels very high for you. Not sure what features it should have, but there is definitely something you can provide businesses that would be worth that amount. And they'll be fantastic, low-fuss customers.
I would generally agree about raising prices, but not in this case. At least not until you get better traction and reputation. Pingdom is probably the market leader in this space(?), and you will probably need to beat them on pricing initially (even though there's so many things to do better than they do...).
Agree about yearly plans though. Makes more sense for businesses.
I know it's usually not about features, but I'll definitely look at adding SMS or more specific alert integrations (PagerDuty). Building for developers with webhooks and slack is great, but I would imagine not enough.
Love the design and everything else (also Apex the OS tool is great, even though I only looked at the code but didn't actually use it). I can imagine getting traction is tough in such a busy space. Best of luck!
SMS is the only annoying one really since it's freakishly expensive for what you get (~6$ / 1000 SMS or so), most people seem to have SMS credits that you purchase which just seems annoying to me. I'm thinking about adding SMS to the larger plans though without any weird credits.
I've actually been using IFTTT for my PagerDuty replacement since I can't afford it hahaha, unless I'm missing something they don't seem to charge for phone calls etc
They're definitely a bit on the low side, it still seems hard since most programmers despite making crazy sums of money often complain about spending even $10/m on something haha.
I'll think about raising the prices a bit once I have some exclusive features. I thought having a free plan would be good on the marketing front, and maybe it will be, but I definitely need some features to differentiate the plans
Haha yeah, sounds familiar. That's actually one of the primary reasons to raise them! Unfortunately, your biggest support costs will be from unreasonable people on the cheapest plans. So by raising prices you often weed out the people who complain, but make up for it in the extra dollars from all the silent people who love the product.
The "exclusive features" thing is awesome in theory, but unlikely to matter to most customers. Having a simple, well-designed, straight-forward product can be worth a few extra bucks. Extra features will be gravy in the future (or more stuff for the higher plans).
Free plans are tough, because adding one without a good strategy usually ends up being a distraction and more server/support/etc cost than good for upgrades. Most people will just sign up for a paid plan or a free plan and stay there, unless you have a really great strategy for getting them to upgrade. With that said, I worked at Twilio and we made sure to give a bunch of free credit because we knew getting devs to try it for fun or personal projects would often translate to them convincing their employer to use us for something that made us a lot of money. The difference here is that the true customer was businesses that paid a lot of money.
(If you can't tell, I really enjoy this stuff haha. Hope it's not annoying.)
Hahaha nope not annoying at all, I've always been on the backend sort of missing out on details regarding sales and marketing so it's interesting to get a better feel for this stuff.
I'll have to keep an eye on the analytics for free plans. I'm not tracking conversions very well right now, most seem to choose a paid plan right away (if ever).
Hey Jon. I don't check HN comments very often. Keith was unable to record the audio on his side, plus he didn't have headphones or a microphone. On top of all that, we had to use Google Hangouts instead of Skype, which would have improved the audio at least a little bit. Overall, I think it turned out pretty good for how little I could control myself. Even Nate's episode was bad IMO because the room was so noisy and we were far from the mic. It's hopefully going to get a lot better!
Thanks for the feedback about that chapter, will dive in and see if we can try to make the answer more clear!