August 13th, 2019
Below is my response to the question of the week from our Slow Mode Founders Telegram group #
❓QUESTION OF THE WEEK: What’s the one change you’ve made in your product/business in the last few years that’s had the largest impact? #
For me it was clearly the decision to build a hosted version of HelpSpot. We were losing a lot of customers to SaaS help desk solutions and were certainly late on offering this option to people. #
Providing a hosted solution allowed us to compete with… every other help desk app 😃 to gain sales but also just as importantly to reduce churn in our existing customers. At the same time we introduced subscription pricing moving away from owned licensees which has also been a pretty solid change. #
The higher level take away is that I resisted taking this on for too long, primarily out of fear. It was easier to let customers host it themselves to avoid the responsibility of hosting an app that’s mission critical with our small team. So I resisted what customers clearly told me they wanted over and over to my own detriment. #
It’s interesting how easy it can be for fear to drive your decision making and prevent you from really hearing what your customers are saying. #