Early stage startup life seems like exciting fun – one interviewee likened it to building a rocket ship while launching it simultaneously. Chief marketing officer,Conrad Chuang shares about their turn-based collaboration app TakeTurns, and what goes into the process of continuous product iteration.
One of the things to note about TakeTurns as an organization is that its teams are currently spread across three different countries – Portugal, France, and the United States. This cross-continent setup makes it perfect for Conrad to tap on for his daily “CMO-ing”.
As a technology solution, it is a collaboration software that enables structured and asynchronous collaboration, so members of a team in different remote locations can work together in a shared (digital) space with requests and responses structured in a ‘turn-by-turn’ cadence.
So, this is suitable for people who need to collaborate at a distance, such as attorneys and consultants involved in negotiations or contract work, and marketers like Conrad and his team.
As an early stage startup TakeTurns is in the phase of understanding product-market fit and collecting customer feedback to help refine their product and marketing. Ultimately, the app aims to remove the unstructured chaos of emails by centralizing information and questions in one place.
Why TakeTurns?
CXpose.tech had a lively session with Conrad, trying to understand how the product works, how it was conceived, and why it was ever conceived in the first place.
The two current major digital communications channels we know of are emails and Instant Messaging – they do a pretty good job already, so why create something that requires its already massively large and embedded user base, to change habits and behavior? Is that even possible?
“If people are relying on something on a day-to-day basis, you do have to be thoughtful about how radically you are changing what it is, or you have to tell them how to get back to the previous version with documentation, or videos, or education.”
Conrad thinks that email has made it easy for employees, team members, and collaborators to ask and send comments. “And it’s very efficient at doing that. But what email is not good at doing is actually focusing on the real work.
“All these communications technologies have made it easy to send messages, but not necessarily read the messages.”
Understanding how TakeTurns work, the startup aims to tackle endless rounds of email follow-ups and missed action items by instilling accountability through the turn-based system.
Evolving the marketing approach for TakeTurns
In terms of marketing, Conrad is focusing on the different use cases they have identified so far. “We signed up some early stage customers and we talk to them, because what I’m looking for right now is more anecdotal evidence. I want to hear the actual use cases, I want to hear the stories, I want to be able to follow up.” These use cases are also shared and made public on a blog.
They also start a feedback loop or virtuous cycle whereby input goes into helping product development build and finetune the features that customers want.
“What’s interesting about product marketing is that it’s really about understanding how to fit the technology into the behavioral pattern, or into a client’s life, and then explain to them how to use that.”
Continuous iterations
In an ideal world, the continuous product iteration process happens together within that feedback loop, till it gets to a point where it’s good enough for people to use it.
Conrad observed that the role of the customer success management or CSM team is actually to work hand-in-hand with customers to get their feedback, provide them support, and also help the product management team calibrate features so that they work well and are accepted by the broadest “enough” swath of people.
“I think about this as a balancing act,” he said.
The beauty about software-as–a-solution (SaaS), is that product teams can add new features and tweaks on a weekly basis. “The thing is, they can continue to innovate, and if you do a good job of capturing how people are responding to those upgrades and changes, then you will also know if you should roll them back, or change them!”
There is a downside to SaaS updates however, and Conrad cautions product management teams to be mindful of. “If people are relying on something on a day-to-day basis, you do have to be thoughtful about how radically you are changing what it is, or you have to tell them how to get back to the previous version with documentation, or videos, or education.”
SUMMARY
Early stage startups focus on product development, building a customer base. Early stage business models often involve finalizing your product or services and gathering market data. This is where customer engagement is important to be able to develop that virtuous cycle of user input.
TAKE AWAY
Emails and IMs are not easily replaced. But one can certainly try to enhance and finetune the usage of these almost indispensable communications tools.
