Announcing Feature Upvote

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#1

Feature Upvote allows your customers to openly suggest and upvote improvements in your product.

https://featureupvote.com/

For the last nine years I’ve been creating and selling consumer desktop software. As Feature Upvote is a B2B SaaS, I have a lot to relearn. I’ve received plenty of great advice from people on this forum in building Feature Upvote. Thanks all for helping me get to this point.

I have two requests to make:

  1. Take a good look at the home page, and tell me what’s good and what’s bad. How clear is the value proposition? Can you easily get the information you need to decide whether it is for you?

  2. What’s a creative way you might go about marketing this product? (I do have a strategy for the first few months of marketing, but I’m interested in hearing opinions from others.)

I’m happy to answer any questions about why and how I created Feature Upvote.

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#ChargeLess - what services would be ripe for a low cost competitor?
Feature Upvote - 4 months after launch
Feature Upvote - 2 months after launch
#2

Landing page looks excellent on mobile.

I clearly see what it does and how it’s useful.

The video is clear and concise (but a bit slow and low-energy. Consider getting a professional voiceover artist on Fiverr or Upwork to redo your voiceover).

The demo looks great and works on mobile.

Some thoughts while using the demo…

Using the tool, on mobile, as I’m entering a suggestion title, if the title is too long it’s not scrolling horizontally left or right to let me backtrack and edit it down to make it fit.

Sometimes—not always—businesses may wish to restrict the ability to upvote suggestions only to signed-in users. That way, the business can reach out to the people who suggested as well as those who upvoted a feature for more information, suggest a workaround, or to let them know status/progress, and to let them know that the feature has been finished so you can ask specifically those people to beta test the new feature before releasing it to all your customers. Not all businesses would care about this, which is why maybe it should be an option in a settings screen somewhere. (This one I added as a suggestion in your demo feedback area, so you’ll see it in your moderation queue). Or, instead of forcing sign-in to upvoters, allow them to add contact info as they upvote, maybe a prompt appearing after they upvote where there’s a checkbox that says “notify me” and prompts them to add an email, or something similar.

Another idea: I’d love to see a way for the suggestion submitter and the upvoter to indicate if the submission is an issue that is holding them back from buying. Something simple, and not too involved. Maybe one of the fields to fill out as you’re creating a suggestion is a checkbox to indicate “This is preventing me from making a purchase today” or words to that effect. And maybe this indication is not shown externally to customers browsing the feature suggestion lists (the feature would still be public, but not this one tag). This way, only the business can see that this is a feature holding this user back from buying (or holding them back from upgrading their account, or converting from free to paid, or what have you). Also, as people are upvoting, after they upvote, maybe a checkbox or something appears allowing people to also chime in that yeah, this thing is preventing me from buying today. And if there’s a way to capture the contact info of this upvoter at this point, so much the better.

Here’s a question: are these lists of feature suggestions indexable by Google? Can that be an option? Allow the business owner to decide if Google can or cannot see these.

As a business, can I add tracking pixels? I might like to have my Google, Fb, or Drift tracking code on my feature suggestion pages.

Alright, I’m rambling.

I love the product thus far! Great work, and best of luck.

#3

Thanks for the detailed feedback.

I’ll add your suggestions to own own “dogfooding” page.

are these lists of feature suggestions indexable by Google?

Yes, we’ve taken care to make pages adhere to SEO “best practices”. One of our beta testers has found that their suggestion pages on Feature Upvote are outranking their own site for some queries! If some people tell us they don’t want our pages indexed, we’ll optionally add a “noindex” meta tag.

As a business, can I add tracking pixels?

No, but I’ve now added this to our list of suggestions. Vote it up!

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#4

Okay, looking at your lander on desktop now, I only have a very subjective piece of feedback:

Not digging all the lines everywhere. They’re interrupting my ability to skim and understand what I’m reading.

For example, in the “HOW FEATURE UPVOTE WORKS” portion of the landing page, the vertical timeline layout is a bit tough to get through, visually. As a reader, I have every urge to skip it and scroll past it. But it’s important, you don’t want people just skipping that area.

I’m also suspect of the value of the left-hand vertical line in the headline of the page.

Here’s what your landing page could look like with the timeline just made lighter, but still there, and no headline left border.

And here’s a version with the timeline and headline borders removed completely.

In both, you’ll notice I changed the padding-top on the even (right-hand) side of the timeline items.

For me (yes, this is terribly subjective) these alterations make it much easier to grok.

I dunno, play with it. I’ll stop rambling and let others chime in.

Again, great work!

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#5

This can be a good thing, or a bad thing. :slight_smile:

You mean, if they reach out to you in a customer support ticket? Or, you’re planning to give people a setting to manage this themselves?

#6

I did word that badly. I mean, if it is a popular feature request, we’ll give all customers a checkbox to optionally turn off “index in google” or somesuch. I notice it has already been upvoted… :slight_smile:

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#7

Congrats on launching!

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#8

Great that you launched.

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#9

Looking good. We’ll use this at our company, I will be in touch in our PMs when we’re ready :slight_smile:

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#10

What are the points of differentiation to UserVoice (apart from price!)?

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#11

That’s a good question, and one for which I don’t yet have a good answer. Note to self: Research and write an article or FAQ entry contrasting Feature Upvote and UserVoice.

#12

Why does there have to be differentiation. Simply offer the most useful features for much less.

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#13

In this case, for much, much less. UserVoice seems to be a minimum of $500/month (we’re charging $29/month). With pricing like that, they’ve really turned their back on businesses like ours.

#14

Yeah it’s the same in my industry. Apps that used to be 30 USD per month now going for 10 grand a year (and prepaid at that). The “charge more” mantra has gone way overboard.

#15

We’re aiming squarely at people who want to use UserVoice but find the price outrageous. “UserVoice at a price you can afford” is Feature Upvote’s unofficial tagline, at least for the first year or so while we find our place in the market.

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#16

Nice work! The site (and demo) look great.

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#17

Site looks great, immediately made sense to me.

Getting lots of emails from customers and trials and trying to keep track of them all I can see the benefit this offers. The pricing sounds reasonable especially compared to the alternative

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#18

Is there an option to merge suggestions? I can see where users wouldn’t take the time to look through existing suggestions and then you end up with duplicates. So if the administrator feels that the suggestion is closely related to another, it serves to up-vote the original suggestion and perhaps adds onto the suggestion itself by retaining the comments. Seems better than keeping or deleting duplicates.

Also, the product creator in me can’t help but imagine all the amazing app ideas hiding in suggestions created by users :wink:

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#19

This is something we’re planning to add. You can vote up this suggestion here.

In our beta testing, we discovered that we did end up with almost identical suggestions, even though we do show the user existing suggestions similar to theirs. We also found that some people put two completely unrelated ideas into one suggestion. So we need “split” as well as “merge”.

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#20

Congrats on launching, @SteveMcLeod :slight_smile:

I’ll just add a few comments on the landing page (in desktop):

  1. The items on the pricing blocks seem weirdly aligned. I think it would look much better if the text was left-aligned, and if needed, the number of moderators right aligned, or if not switch the order of the contents (first the text, right aligned, then right next to it, the checks or the number of moderators).
  2. I find it a bit off that the width of the hero section and the header at the top are not the same. And as has been suggested, get rid of the vertical line in the headline.
  3. Not sure how much use are the screenshots, considering there’s already a video and a link to a demo.
  4. If you have any customers yet (even if they don’t pay), ask if you can feature their logos in the landing page to add some social proof.

Good luck!

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