Ian Landsman

sometimes its the simply features

April 19, 2006

I love when customers post to the HelpSpot forums because it leaves a great history for future customers to use in researching HelpSpot and in empowering them to find their own answers to problems. However, one thing has always driven me a bit nuts about forums in general. You never really know if the person received your response.

That's why HelpSpot has the subscribe via email option, so customers don't need to return to get their answer. Remember HelpSpot's forums aren't about getting the most traffic to your site, they're 100% about providing great customer service. Until now though there's been a big missing link. HelpSpot knows if the poster is subscribed to the topic via email but the staff doesn't! Countless times I've answered a pressing issue in the forums and wondered if the customer received my response right away or not.

Well now I'll know. The small golden email icon in the graphic below lets me know that the customer is subscribed to this topic via email.

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helpspot 120 is out

April 19, 2006

Whew! You may have noticed the cob webs around here lately. It's entirely due to trying to get this new release out. This one is far and away the biggest release since HelpSpot launched. It's a big weight off my shoulders to have it out there. Though I must admit I always find this first day very stressful. There's this fear that I've missed something major and everyones data is going to get hosed and then they'll come looking for me and beat me up with my own keyboard.

Beyond that though it will be good to be back. I plan on keeping things light over the next week or so. Just answering support and blogging a bit. It's time for a bit of a reset.

If you're interested you can find the release nots for 1.2 here:
http://www.userscape.com/helpdesk/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=40

It's somewhat deceptive because some of the "major new features" are very major and could have entire pages to themselves, but I'm not a big fan of making release notes long just for the sake of being long.

new feature rules

April 18, 2006

HelpSpot 1.2.0 (out this week) has powerful new Rule features which really let you manage your installation. The first type of rules are mail rules, just like you'd have in your desktop mail client. Mail rules allow you to route mail, instantly respond to certain types of requests and more. The second type of rules I call Automation rules. These allow you to set conditions under which existing requests in your installation can be modified in some way. For instance, if it's been over a day since a custom received an update you could notify your staff and/or notify the customer, you could escalate it to a senior staffer and much much more. Below I've included a short video of how the rules interface works. It's a pretty nifty wizard type UI. If the UI works well it will also eventually be used in creating filters, but for now I wanted to limit it to the rules to see how it works.

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what happened to bingo

April 10, 2006

My father asks a good question. What happened to bingo?

6 month sales update

April 5, 2006

It's been a bit under six months since I launched HelpSpot so I thought it was a good time to share some more sales data as I do from time to time. Overall I'm very happy with sales. They're well above what I expected for this point.

I'm especially encouraged since I've done pretty much no advertising or PR. I expect to be able to push sales a good percentage higher once I start to focus more on PR over the summer.

Below is the first 6 months charted out:

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The points are in scale. I've left numbers off so they don't detract from the more interesting data. I've talked about some specific numbers before and I plan on doing so again when I hit a certain number I have in mind.

So let's go over each month. You'll see I started very nicely in October. That in fact is only the last week of October since HelpSpot launched on October 24th. That's the benefit of having a strong beta. You get a nice bump right up front.

In November there was a large dip which I expected. Most of the beta users had purchased that were going to purchase and I hadn't allowed new beta users near the end of the beta so there were no sales in the pipeline. November was mostly about getting new trial users.

December bumped back up as November trial users turned to customers.

I have nooo idea what happened in January. I assume that the slow down in trial users in late December due to the holidays led to the slow month.

In February sales went back up to the previous stable level around the same amount as October and December.

As you can see last month was a great month. Sales more than doubled over the previous monthly high. I'm not sure I can maintain that much momentum for this month, but it is lining up to be another good one.

Hopefully this was a bit informative. I know I couldn't find anyone sharing this information a few months back when I was looking. Nobody likes to show those down dips in their charts, but I think it's a great look at the way revenues roll when you're starting a small ISV.

Update:
Jeff asked for a trials graph, so I've happily added that below. I've graphed them together so you can see the trend, obviously their scales are different.