At SupportBee, we are big fans of paying for services we use. Apart from open source, we don’t use any free hosted software. We just don’t believe in the sustainability of the free model. Apart from paying for the usual stuff like hosting and domains, we also pay for DNS hosting. So far we had been using DynDNS but only for our other product Muziboo. After the Godaddy boycott, I decided to move SupportBee from Godaddy to DynDNS. However the move did not go exactly as planned and we… Read more
The ‘Gowalla Situation’
Yesterday, I posted on Hacker News asking for feedback on our new marketing site. We got great feedback on our copy, video and other things. If you are working on a marketing site, you should certainly check out that thread. We also had a bunch of beta signups and one of them sent us this question
Can I confirm
1. You will be working in this for a long time?2. What your pricing might be like.I am trying to avoid the gowalla situation here.
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The SupportBee team at Start-up Chile
SupportBee is now operating out of Santiago, Chile as a part of the Start-Up Chile program. We had earlier blogged about our selection in the program and the application process.
Two things that we absolutely love about Startup Chile – the office space that they provide and the equity free seed grant of USD 40K. Are you wondering what the big fuss about the office space is? Check out this video!
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SupportBee’s Startup Chile Application and Video
SupportBee is one of the 5 Indian startups that got through the latest batch of the Startup Chile program. It took us about half a day to finish up the application. If you are looking for a reference, here are our answers. Since I don’t have access to the actual application, I am publishing the first draft of our application here. After I submitted, I had to work on a few of the below answers to fit their word limit though.
Tweet your pitch in 140 characters or less
Customer Service is… Read more
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Our Customer Development Questionnaire: How it helped us decide our MVP
The idea to build SupportBee , a help desk system, as our next product came up eight months back. It was a personal need that we felt while handling support for Muziboo. We had tried out a lot of the existing software in the market and did settle on one that we used for almost a year and a half. But, we had our own frustrations. Well, the thing to do would have been to build a software that satisfied our needs and put it out for others to try.… Read more
Auto-Refreshing lists is a basic expectation in 2011
This comment on Hacker News by phillco caught my attention today. Specifically,
it’s 2011, yet everything that manipulates the case table (arguably the most important part of the app) seems to require a full page refresh
Unfortunately, this problem is pretty commonplace and seen even in the best products/services. For example, the AWS EC2 web console does not auto-refresh. You could have several new servers fired and several terminated but you won’t know unless you manually refresh the page. For systems where listings are expected to change frequently, auto-refresh is… Read more
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Can’t monetize free users? Try threatening them with legal action
At SupportBee, we are big fans of charging for your product to avoid the Gowalla Situation. Unfortunately while doing our first startup Muziboo, we ended up using a (then) free Gigya Wildfire. Like every ambitious startup, Gigya raised over $20 million in funding over the last few years. Initially they wanted to grow by offering the service for free (who doesn’t love virality?) and monetize by charging for branded widgets. However, as often is the case with “we’ll sell data or advanced analytics and offer the product for free” startups, they probably… Read more