Hi Rajaraman,
Thanks so much for this question, and for taking the time to listen to a podcast I was on – a true honour!
I love this topic – the hardest thing is trying to condense my thoughts on it, as there’s so much to say. I’ll try to answer each of your key questions as best I can.
How we think about product and pricing decisions
I think product and pricing are totally intertwined, and thus everything that spawns from that – it’s all integrated, and hard to separate out.
A lot of the mistakes we’ve made over the years have been around treating them as isolated disciplines – e.g. setting prices higher while still having a low-touch SaaS model, or on the flip side, building functionality at higher price points and seeking feedback from free tier users.
So these days we tend to make sure we look at things as a whole. For example, we’re working on a huge new part of the platform, that we’re calling Automation, and it’s all about helping our customers act on the customer data they have in the platform, and ultimately to engage with their own customers in dramatically better ways.
With this new product, we’re very conscious that we’re in a competitive space, and that our customers have many alternatives available to them. But we’re working on this product because we know our customers can be more successful with the platform by doing it in GoSquared, we know that it fits our wider goal of helping businesses grow online, and we also know we can offer a product at a very competitive price point.
Pricing is such a hard thing to test and experiment with. We are certainly not the experts, but we’ve tried many strategies over the years, and it’s always a trade off of a few factors:
- Are we competitive in the market?
- Are we making enough money from our customers?
- Can our customers understand the pricing – is it simple enough?
- Can we implement the pricing structure / system without eating away at our time dedicated to delivering more value to our customers?
How our customer base affects how we think about categories and differentiation
We feel extremely fortunate to work with businesses of all shapes and sizes.
The breadth and depth of our customer base has been a huge asset to us as we have seen so much of the world change this year. Some of our customers have grown tremendously, while others have struggled. By not being too dependent on any one segment, we’ve been able to offer help to those who need it, and we as a business have been well positioned to handle a lot of change.
We don’t spend much time thinking about categorisation of GoSquared, other than when we need to list ourselves on review sites. I’ll be first to admit, that we haven’t 100% nailed down the category we exist in today – we believe there’s something new, that is yet to be defined, that is greater than the sum of parts that make up our feature set.
What drives us forward, and enables us to differentiate, is by listening intently to our customers, combining their needs and feedback, with our own vision, and focusing on solving really big meaty problems. It sounds so damn obvious, and I know everyone and their dog tells you this is how you should do it, but it’s incredibly difficult to execute this over a prolonged period of time in practice.
We believe that by delivering better for our customers than anyone else, we will help those customers grow, we will grow because of them, and they will become our best marketing department.
How we teach our team to learn to step into the shoes of our customers
Anything about working with our team comes from step one: hiring fantastic people, and not lowering that bar. Without having great people, that you have a solid trust base to build on, then everything else is difficult. I love our team, and every day I feel hugely honoured to work with them.
In terms of keeping the customer front and centre, and truly understanding their needs, there are a couple of practical things:
- We use our own product, and so we are a customer of ourselves. This drives a lot of new ideas and product thinking.
- Part of the GoSquared platform is GoSquared Inbox – a shared team inbox to enable you to respond to your visitors and customers.
- We have a rota, and every member of the team – in any position – spends some time using Inbox to respond to customers on a regular basis.
- The rota means that not only does everyone experience our own product, but they also spend time on “the front lines” helping customers and hearing their feedback first hand.
- I don’t think anything can replace first hand experience – no matter how well you think you understand your customers, you can always understand them better!
- Beyond this, we also are always evolving our frameworks for how we believe we help customers – moving away from the features we build, to thinking about the problems we solve for them, and where we are strong, and where we suck at solving those problems for them.
I hope this is helpful, Rajaraman. Happy to expand further on anything here if you’re interested!