Thanks a bunch, fixed this just now. It's great how can you spend loads of time on finding typos in the regular copy and then let something like this slip through.
I'll add a few more screenshots of the various sections, especially the management interface.
Additionally, I was thinking of putting up a demo account so interested customers could try out most everything (probably except for file uploads) without having to sign up – would you use something like that?
I guess this was my trying to work against the often-levied criticism of "I have no idea what your product does based on the landing page" around here. Based on your and other's feedback I might have overshot the mark a bit there, though. I'll see to it that there will be more screenshots as well as a demo account available and will reduce the text a bit. Sometimes less is more, after all.
* I would avoid using narrow fonts. It might be personal thing but it's really difficult to read when font is too narrow http://i.imgur.com/c2mqM6o.png (screenshot taken on chrome `v41.0.2272.89 m` on windows )
Screenshots will be added, likely along with a demo account to try things out first-hand.
I'm also not terribly happy with the way the font renders on Windows compared to Mac. I was playing around with letter-spacing on the body text, but everything above 0.5px turned out really ugly. I might have blinders on from seeing it the way it is now much too often in the past few weeks, though. Maybe switching to something along the lines of Proxima Nova might help, I'll have a go at this on my local development in the next few days.
Maybe US/UK-centric, but... localize your pricing page! It's an immediate & unnecessary barrier for a non-European visitor to see a pricing page in euros. Maybe UK users might be more used to it, but for many USA-based prospective users, it can make it seem that this app is "foreign" and "not for me".
Good point, I'll see into getting that localized along with prices in USD in the next few days.
If you don't mind me asking: Assuming you were interested in the service, is this something that would actually put you off, or is it rather a "Meh, I know what they mean but this could have been solved better" moment?
Coming from Germany, we have rather good consumer protection laws, so my general mindset is: "If they don't immediately require a credit card/bank account, I can more or less safely give it a try no matter what."
However, I understand that that's not the case everywhere else.
If it is a service I am using for personal use, it does not put me off. IME, in the business setting, for whatever reason, some people seem to have an aversion to seeing numbers related to pricing in a foreign (to them) format, though.
I'm aiming to get a non-EU internationalized version up as soon as possible. I was hoping the current (somewhat) equality of EUR and USD would be enough for a start, but apparently, this is not the case.
Wanted to throw in: this is exactly the sort of thing I've been looking for and I'll be looking into your offering soon.
Also: what everyone else has said so far. Typos ("unless you tell us differently" is what you mean on the FAQ about deleting data) and localization issues, lack of obvious feature list on landing, etc. - if those weren't issues, I may have not decided to put off looking at your service until later.
Take your time, maybe the next time you'll look at it there won't be any typos left ;) (At least the wording should be fixed now, thanks for pointing that out.)
Thanks for the feedback so far, everybody, it's really appreciated.
It's the first time for me to offer a product on its own apart from the regular Rails consulting/development business, so especially the comments regarding international acceptance are very much welcome. I'll see to offering an internationalized landing page as the next step so as to not put off international audiences.
That said, if you want to experiment a bit more, drop me a line at dk@cormhq.com and I'll expand your free trial for a month or two to get you going without worries.
Also: Interesting how time zones work in this regard. Most comments are from 1-3 hours ago, I had expected the first comments to pop up 4-6 hours ago. Terribly difficult to judge, these things.
What are some good use cases for this? I want to like it, but I always want to see screenshots or a video or a demo before signing up, even for a trial.
Your "Not Everything is a Sales Pipeline" is the reason I like it and I think that could be a good selling point for you. My dad was recently looking for something for his business and came to this problem that everything out there is heavyweight (Salesforce) or pipeline centered.
He runs a small tourist attraction in a tourist town, and needs something to manage the business relations with they have with hotels, shops, and other attractions. A lightweight tool for a small number of contacts, where communication and events can all be tracked in one spot, but isn't sales oriented. Would love to know if this is a good fit for him.
Sorry for taking so long to reply, I was a bit swamped over the last days.
There are now a few screenshots over at the "Features" page (https://cormhq.com/features) as well as link to a live Demo at the bottom of "Features" and at the top of "Pricing"/"Sign Up". You/Your dad can just check it out yourself and see whether it's the right fit (I'd argue it is).
That said: This was originally planned during my work for another startup where we were in contact with a lot of customers of relatively low lifetime value. As such, we needed a lightweight system to track our interactions with them without any sales overhead – all we needed was to know if/when we already had contacted them and maybe how their mood was. Plus, a bit of oversight over our outbound agents was required, so some basic statistics needed to be collected.
(Also, a lot of our customers came through other channels than direct contact, so we would often have to move contact details from production systems into our CRM, which prompted the inclusion of an API.)
So, I'd say the main use case is if you're in a similar position: You need to keep track of who you've already talked to and what they said, but you're not in need of a real campaign management and don't have a highly structured sales process that needs to be reflected in your CRM.
This often applies to smaller startups selling SaaS-Accounts, where most customer contact is of the "are you happy/is everything working?"-variety and large acquisition strategies are prohibitively expensive compared to what a customer brings in (or are simply not relevant).
18 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 28.0 ms ] threadAdditionally, I was thinking of putting up a demo account so interested customers could try out most everything (probably except for file uploads) without having to sign up – would you use something like that?
Plus, like someone said, more screenshots or a video would be more explanatory
Thanks!
* I would add more screenshots
* I would avoid using narrow fonts. It might be personal thing but it's really difficult to read when font is too narrow http://i.imgur.com/c2mqM6o.png (screenshot taken on chrome `v41.0.2272.89 m` on windows )
I'm also not terribly happy with the way the font renders on Windows compared to Mac. I was playing around with letter-spacing on the body text, but everything above 0.5px turned out really ugly. I might have blinders on from seeing it the way it is now much too often in the past few weeks, though. Maybe switching to something along the lines of Proxima Nova might help, I'll have a go at this on my local development in the next few days.
Anyways, thanks a bunch for providing feedback!
Edit: Screenshot from a Mac (Chrome, same version) for comparison: http://i.imgur.com/lqxU5Nj.png
If you don't mind me asking: Assuming you were interested in the service, is this something that would actually put you off, or is it rather a "Meh, I know what they mean but this could have been solved better" moment?
Coming from Germany, we have rather good consumer protection laws, so my general mindset is: "If they don't immediately require a credit card/bank account, I can more or less safely give it a try no matter what." However, I understand that that's not the case everywhere else.
Thanks for the feedback!
Also: what everyone else has said so far. Typos ("unless you tell us differently" is what you mean on the FAQ about deleting data) and localization issues, lack of obvious feature list on landing, etc. - if those weren't issues, I may have not decided to put off looking at your service until later.
But if it does what it says on the tin, good job!
Take your time, maybe the next time you'll look at it there won't be any typos left ;) (At least the wording should be fixed now, thanks for pointing that out.)
Thanks for the feedback so far, everybody, it's really appreciated.
It's the first time for me to offer a product on its own apart from the regular Rails consulting/development business, so especially the comments regarding international acceptance are very much welcome. I'll see to offering an internationalized landing page as the next step so as to not put off international audiences.
That said, if you want to experiment a bit more, drop me a line at dk@cormhq.com and I'll expand your free trial for a month or two to get you going without worries.
Also: Interesting how time zones work in this regard. Most comments are from 1-3 hours ago, I had expected the first comments to pop up 4-6 hours ago. Terribly difficult to judge, these things.
Your "Not Everything is a Sales Pipeline" is the reason I like it and I think that could be a good selling point for you. My dad was recently looking for something for his business and came to this problem that everything out there is heavyweight (Salesforce) or pipeline centered.
He runs a small tourist attraction in a tourist town, and needs something to manage the business relations with they have with hotels, shops, and other attractions. A lightweight tool for a small number of contacts, where communication and events can all be tracked in one spot, but isn't sales oriented. Would love to know if this is a good fit for him.
That said: This was originally planned during my work for another startup where we were in contact with a lot of customers of relatively low lifetime value. As such, we needed a lightweight system to track our interactions with them without any sales overhead – all we needed was to know if/when we already had contacted them and maybe how their mood was. Plus, a bit of oversight over our outbound agents was required, so some basic statistics needed to be collected.
(Also, a lot of our customers came through other channels than direct contact, so we would often have to move contact details from production systems into our CRM, which prompted the inclusion of an API.)
So, I'd say the main use case is if you're in a similar position: You need to keep track of who you've already talked to and what they said, but you're not in need of a real campaign management and don't have a highly structured sales process that needs to be reflected in your CRM. This often applies to smaller startups selling SaaS-Accounts, where most customer contact is of the "are you happy/is everything working?"-variety and large acquisition strategies are prohibitively expensive compared to what a customer brings in (or are simply not relevant).