So we had started our sales of Responster in the early Fall of 2013. The decision had been made to make this a soft launch. This way we could learn how the market worked, what our potential customers’ needs were and how they would react to our product. After a couple of months of exploring sales we had got enough feedback and ideas for improvement of Responster. We also knew how we could tweak the sales process.
Updates of Responster
As you might know, by now if you’re a follower of this series on the development of Responster, we’ve always focused on making a product that is both easy to use and good-looking. In one of my earlier posts, I described what improvements we made based on early feedback. Well, with the feedback we got from those we met in sales meetings we set out to improve Responster even more.
Drag-and-Drop Survey Builder
One of the first changes we made was to make it easier to build your surveys in Responster. We understood that it could hard to get a good overview of the whole survey structure when building surveys. Based on this we implemented a drag and drop tool that lets you add questions in any order you want without ever losing the overview of the whole survey structure. It looks as shown in the picture below.
Follow-up Questions
With the new survey builder, we were able to add follow-up questions. This was something that added a lot of value for our users, since they now could ask even more questions depending on what their respondents answered. With follow-up questions, we could offer our users the possibility to create advanced surveys that were still easy to manage and good-looking.
Routine Check Surveys
While meeting some companies during our sales run we got a new idea for how Responster could be used: routine checks. We mentioned this in our post on different types of data collection, which you can find here. These companies that we met told us that they used paper forms to do frequent routine checks in their daily work. The thing is that it often took a lot of time before the results from the forms had been transcribed into actionable data.
We came up with the idea to make it possible to navigate in the surveys shown on the iPad. Survey questions had before this been shown automatically one after another. With this new feature, the respondent could choose to go back and forth between questions as he or she liked. When the last question had been answered a summary view of all the answers was shown and the respondent had the ability to change an answer if needed.
We immediately saw how our new users could save time that they previously had spent on administrating paper forms. Now, results from their routine checks could be delivered in real-time.
How We Tweaked Sales
Having met companies in the local area showing Responster in person we understood what parts of the product that we needed to focus more on, and what parts we had to explain better. With this knowledge, we felt that we had got enough feedback to take sales one step further by starting offering web demos.
We just had to find a tool that we could use for these demos. After some research and testing, we settled for Screen leap. This web service lets you share your screen with others over the Internet, and in the free version you get one hour a day of free streaming. For us this was enough to begin with. We also figured out how we could present surveys on the iPad while demoing Responster over the web. A tool called Reflector let us mirror the iPad screen to the computer screen, which then was shared with the demo participant. This proved to be a really powerful setup since we could show the whole product without having to meet in person.
Up until now we had only focused on direct sales of Responster. At this point when we had improved Responster even more we felt that it was time to open up to a wider audience. So we started planning our international launch on the Internet. You’ll learn more about this in next weeks post!
The future of feedback is a 10-part series on how Responster grew into what it has become today.
Every week I’ll publish a new post where I tell you about the life of a startup, the Responster-team and how a product is born.
I hope that you’ll find these posts interesting. If you have a startup of your own or have experience in software similar to Responster, I’d love hearing from you. You can drop me a line whenever you want at [email protected].
Take care,
Hjalmar