The personal touch: how to know your customers better
Matt Doyle is the founder of Launchcloud, and one of our Virgin StartUp ambassadors. When you're a startup, you have the advantage of being able to give them the personal touch - and his blog this month demonstrates how they've been putting it into practice throughout June.
It’s been a busy month at Launchcloud, so I’ve got a lot to talk about! We've appeared at the IPM Shopper Conference, given a talk at Google Campus, and been doing work with new customers, to give them a real feel of what it means to use Launchcloud. This month has been all about understanding our customers, getting to know them better, and figure out how we can meet their needs - here's what we've done.
Spreading the word about Virgin StartUp
One of the best things about the talk at Google Campus was that it gave me the opportunity to get in amongst others who are getting their own businesses off the ground, and talk to them about what I’ve learned. One of the main things people asked me was about getting early-stage funding. This gave me the perfect opportunity to tell them how valuable Virgin StartUp can be. Doing this talk has opened quite a few more doors for me too, with the chance of some magazine interviews coming up . Fellow Virgin StartUp ambassador Zara Cakes recently talked about the importance of saying yes, and this was a perfect example of how investing the time in opportunities like this can really pay off. Watch my talk below.
Talking Launchcloud features at the IPM Shopper Conference
Attending the IPM Shopper Conference - a conference dedicated to exploring how to market to shoppers better - turned into an excellent opportunity to talk about what Launchcloud has to offer. For a business that’s growing, occasions like this are golden. I got to take along one of our clients from Hels Angels, who are working with Jägermeister, looking into the promotion of Jägerbombs. The work they’re doing is around various activities involving hundreds of people. The activities are often on the same day, so it’s a massive task to collect and collate the data.
This is where Launchcloud comes in, and it’s fantastic that Hels Angels are happy to talk about how they are finding the form creation, mobile data gathering and instant report creation features are helping them to complete a mammoth task.
Happy to welcome new clients
Away from the events, it’s been great to welcome our first US client on board, as well as a UK-based brewery. It’s even better that their requirements are so different, so we get to show off the diversity of Launchcloud, something we love to do. The US-based customer is a tech startup, and Launchcloud is helping them collate computer screen video clips and enabling them to contextualise the content.
On this side of the Atlantic we’re helping our new brewery clients in a completely different way. They’re using Launchcloud to gather and collate data around taste tests they’re doing with customers, to help decide on the best beers to serve. They’re also collecting customer thoughts on the food they should be serving. I’m hoping they’ll invite me along to the taste tests, although it hasn’t happened yet...
Explaining how Launchcloud is different
One of the main things I have to explain when talking to potential clients, is why Launchcloud is different to products such as Wufoo and Survey Monkey. I know that’s not unique to me - I’m willing to bet that many of you reading this have had to explain your unique selling points too.
I'm constantly working on the quickest simplest ways to explain our USPs to potential customers. A good way to help someone understand what you do is use another product or service as a point of reference. For example I would say “Launchcloud is like a web-based version of FileMaker that you can plug into anything.”
Doing things that don’t scale
One thing we’re working on with our customers that we think is really important has a lot to do with the concept of doing things that don’t scale - at our size now we can help out our smaller clients in a way we might not be able to in the future, but doing this will help them grow now.
As a startup that’s still expanding we know how important it is to give our customers a standard of service that will encourage them to stay with us, and to be positive about our product. That’s why we’re working with new customers in a way that we may not be able to as our customer base expands. We’re not just throwing them in at the deep end, we’re taking their requirements and developing their first Launchcloud forms for them. This gives them a firm base they can work from.
Doing this doesn’t just benefit our customers either. As we work through real projects using the Launchcloud system, we can identify anything that could be simplified or improved. All the testing in the world doesn’t replace genuine work activity when it comes to taking a clear look at your product.
For more tech chat and startup chat, watch Matt's video below.
