![]() ![]() So what was the difference between Slack and us? Basically focus, they defined their niche from day one and focused on that while we were trying to solve everyone’s problem, which is tempting but ultimately wrong.Īt that time we were almost 20 people with local branches in 5 different countries and cash flow was starting to become an issue. We were growing but way too slow compared to what was originally planned and the current scale of our company. As history now shows, the idea of what we were trying to solve was great but that was all we had in common: 6 years later Slack was filling their IPO while we were struggling to grow. Remember I mentioned we had a team collaboration product? Well, almost at the same time we launched, another unknown company started solving a similar problem, a startup you might have heard of: Slack ?. And we were right, open rates went over the roof, up to 5X what we got from in-app messages using our live chat app and more than 10X what we got from similar email campaigns. At the time it was just an awful form for new posts, a basic newsfeed and the unread notifications red bubble.Īll hail the power of the mighty unread notifications bubble ! Being natively integrated as part of the app our users instinctively knew that those notifications had to be relevant. So we created a real MVP, and what I mean by real is that is was really minimal. ![]() We not only wanted to let our users know about new features but also have a repository of past updates so they, and especially new users, knew that we were constantly improving our app. What we knew was that our users were really reading our in-app notifications, probably because it was a native part of our app and people hate to leave unread notifications, so we decided to add a small notification center dedicated just to changelog and release notes content. Blog: Let’s face it, nobody knows when there’s a new post and most people don’t want to spend 15 minutes reading a long form technical release notes.Emailing: One of the most over abused channels, open rates for this kind of messages were way too low and engagement was even lower.In-app messages: It was our main communication channel for sales, support and onboarding so we didn’t want to abuse it and have some of our most important business messages ignored.Hard to set up and very dev resource intensive. In-app product tours: Worked great for core features but could be overwhelming if you don’t limit them. ![]() ![]() We tried several solutions but none of them worked: Soon we realized that one of the most difficult product-related tasks was figuring out a good Feature Discovery strategy, in other words letting our users know there was a new feature they can now use to improve their experience. We were growing fine and adding many features to the product. Mariano Rodriguez (right) and co-founder Spencer Coon (left), just before launching the Beta version of Beamer We wanted to target all non tech-savvy small companies all around the world, a very ambitious goal which later proved to be our biggest mistake. Our idea was simple, to solve two big problems for SMBs, communication and coordinating tasks, by combining team messaging with task management in one app. The journey begins.Ħ years ago, my co-founder Spencer Coon, and I started a team collaboration SaaS called Hibox. My name is Mariano Rodriguez Colombelli, co-founder of Beamer and in this post I want to share the journey that took us from almost going bankrupt to pivoting and now being halfway to the holy grail of early stage startups, $1 million in annual recurring revenue (with a team of only 5!). Today Beamer is used by more than 5000 companies, including many of the top 100 SaaS in the world. Nearly 2 years ago we built a small internal app for our former startup that lately evolved into Beamer, a complete changelog and release notes tool for SaaS who need to keep their users updated about their latest products changes and get their feedback. ![]()
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