Answer Customers - new product would love feedback

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#1

Hey all. I’m just now launching my first B2B SAAS product:

https://answercustomers.com/

Answer Customers is solving an old problem when it comes to online marketing. We know that creating content is valuable for SEO and making sales, but people hate writing articles or make excuses why they don’t do it.

Our solution is to lower the barrier to creating content and to reuse one of the best sources you have for creating content that converts - customer questions.

The way it works is we connect Zendesk to WordPress so you can turn Zendesk tickets into WordPress posts.

I know that if you get a question one time from a customer, you are going to get it again and again. Sure, you could use a knowledge base, but those live on a subdomain and have crappy SEO and are terrible for generating leads and sales. My product puts the customer answers right on your website, so it can generate leads, email subscribers, and ultimately sales.

This is v1, so we are supporting Zendesk and WordPress, but we are already working on other content sources and CMS’s. If the demand is there, we can connect any content source to any CMS.

For most businesses, no matter how easy a CMS is to use, they all require training and usually content creation ends up being the job of the person who “runs the website”. I think that every employee has valuable content to contribute and there are better ways to get content from other systems onto the public facing website.

So my friends, that’s Answer Customers.

I would love any and all feedback, so fire away!

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#2

Congrats on the launch.
So your tool copies the content of a question in Zendesk and creates a post in my wordpress?
Why would I do it that way, instead of simply copy/paste the text?
The tool saves me like … 3 to 4 seconds.

Another problem is that I would almost always want to modify slighly the answer when targeting the public on my blog. So the manually copy/paste of the question makes much more sense to me, than using any kind of automation for the process.

Writing content sucks for most people (me included), that’s correct. But the problem is the content itself, not the process of creating the post in wordpress.

This might be a good plugin for Wordpress for really lazy people (like I said it saves me 4 seconds top… even I have like 40 windows opened and have problems finding the windows to copy/paste the text). The pricing is … 25$ per month for 5 articles? So I pay 25$ per month to save 5 x 4 = 20 seconds? And what about the time I need to configure to connect ZenDesk and my Wordpress. For not so tech-savy people this is going to be much more of a problem, than simply copying the text.

Even If it was s free plugin for Wordpress I do not think I would be using it.
I hate to be so negative, but I do not think that you have validated your idea enough.

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#3

Jeff thanks for the feedback and I don’t disagree. It is entirely possible that this idea isn’t validated enough, or fully fleshed out like it should be.

Some of those same issues are things my partner Shawn and I have talked about and here is what we were thinking…

Yes people could absolutely copy and paste, so this tool might not make as much sense for a one or two person team.

However, what if your support people don’t have access to your WP installation? They can’t copy paste, but with our tool they can click a button to push the content to WP where whoever manages the website can edit and format it before it is published.

We are attempting to price according to value. Approx $3 per article is cheap, cheap content. Especially for content written to solve a real customer problem.

I don’t think you are wrong, but you might not be the kind of business we are going after. I’m not sure.

It’s so early that while I have a target market defined in my head, until we get sales it’s a guess.

Thanks for your feedback and I don’t mind it being negative. I’d rather have people bring up honest problems than have massive blind spots.

#4

I’d redo your video so there isn’t a major mistake/bug (sending the answer twice) in it…

You may want to think about some sort of additional value add as I can do this right now with Zapier for less money.

#5

Who are your target customers?

However, what if your support people don’t have access to your WP installation?

Seems to me like highly unlikely scenario. I can always add a new user to write posts in my WP.
I would speculate that in most small to medium sized companies the person/team who is responsible for the site, also has also support roles and therefore access to Zendesk.
And bigger companies would have no problem with hiring people just to write content.
So it’s not clear to me who are you targeting.

#6

It doesn’t feel like you are solving a pain point. Unfortunately, I agree with what has previously been said. It doesn’t appear to save much time and i do not view your tool as a “content creator.” It feels more like a feature, but not a product.

Thinking of ways to improve it… have you considered eliminating the need for the user to log into Zendesk? It would help save time if you could eliminate second login. Perhaps you could pull in questions from Zendesk into WordPress and the user could choose what they want to publish from within WordPress.

#7

That’s a good idea and we are keen to remove the notion of having every person in the company have to have multiple accounts on multiple systems.

One way we are solving that is send content via email. That feature just shipped this afternoon and I haven’t even got the marketing up for it.

Now any person in a company who can send an email can get content into WordPress. (Yes I know WP already has that feature…sortof…)

I’ve worked at companies that sell their own CMS systems or websites backed by WP, and they all have the same thing in common - no matter how nice you make it, for nontechnical users it’s just too difficult to learn a CMS and publish content.

Those nontechnical users are in sales and support and are sitting on tons of customer interactions that could be a fantastic basis for website content.

Also, I realize that if I’m going after small businesses with nontechnical users, so we are planning on doing white glove onboarding/integration as needed.