Today we’re excited to announce that Siftery is joining forces with G2 Crowd to pursue this vision of building the most complete and intelligent marketplace for software buyers and vendors. A platform to find, compare and purchase software, and then track spend across the stack and optimize usage.

While Siftery has its strengths in data, community, and a deep understanding of who’s using what, G2 Crowd is the world’s #1 marketplace that connects software buyers and vendors in an unbiased way. More than two million users rely on G2 Crowd every month to help them find and buy the best software for their business. When we met the G2 Crowd team earlier this summer, it quickly became evident that their seasoned executive team, market momentum, and culture of enablement will help us in accelerating our mission.

There are lots of natural synergies between the two platforms and with this acquisition, we hope to give the B2B community what it hasn’t had until now, and what it needs and deserves.

A huge thank you to all the Siftery users and partners who have helped make Siftery what it is today. We hope you are as excited as we are about the journey ahead.

- Team Siftery

G2 Crowd and Siftery join forces was originally published in Vamshi Mokshagundam on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Kevin William David interviewed Matic Užmah, CEO at Support Hero to know more.

Hi Matic, Let’s get started!

So tell us about Support Hero?

Support Hero is self-service knowledge base that helps companies educate their clients. Helping them to create and deliver a game changing user education experience that increases retention and engagement, while reducing customer relationship costs.. Our advanced statistics will tell you what your users search for and what they need help with That will help you create the support content that matches their common requests.

With clients like Kissmetrics and Thinkific, Support Hero has quietly been transforming the way users troubleshoot issues on the websites.

Most small software companies can’t afford offering 24/7 customer support. It’s just not feasible. The other thing I would add is that offering efficient self help resources can help a lot with that. Users don’t expect us to be available 24/7, but they still appreciate being able to find the answer to their question quickly!

Tutorials and FAQs are key to help your users discover your site’s features. With Support Hero, you can easily create, import, and manage our support resources.

95% of users will leave your app if they can’t find the answers to their questions in less than 1 minute. With Support Hero, you can embed your Help Center within your app. It won’t be hard to find!

Our advanced statistics will tell you what your users search for and what they need help with That will help you create the support content that matches their common requests.

Keep improving your support resources to educate your users over time. You’ll then easily be able to track the results of your efforts within Support Hero.

Tell me more about why you are building this?

We’ve been building Saas software for many years. From the early days of our startups, we’ve always invested a lot in great customer support. A lot of time, a lot of tools, a lot of money. We’ve used UserVoice, The Help Scout Team, Zendesk and all their competitors. Most of them are pretty good to handle inbound support tickets, but when it comes to providing support materials to our users and avoid those costly support tickets, they didn’t do the job. As we kept receiving a TON of questions we had already answered in our FAQs and tutorials, we knew that there had to be a better solution.

That’s how the concept of Support Hero came to life: the only way to make your support materials do the job they are supposed to do is to embed them where the users need them, within the app! We’ve been building Support Hero with that concept in mind, and we use it everyday on our own Saas products. You can be assured that we’ll keep improving Support Hero every day. We’re happy to see you around and hope we’ll help you reduce your incoming tickets, and improve your key Saas metrics.

How is Support Hero different from what already exists in the market?

With Support Hero you can add value to tools like Drift, Intercom, Kissmetrics, Zendesk or Uservoice or totally replace tools like FaastHelp or HelpDocs.

The embedded widget is really slow with Zendesk, and, you got that, it’s a big plus with Support Hero. The insights are not as useful or actionable as ours. Overall, Support Hero is a simpler product doing one thing and focusing on that one thing, Zendesk is much more complex to use (that’s the feedback I get from users who chose us vs. Zendesk).

Support Hero pinpoints exactly what users look for and what kinds of problems they run into and making sure that the support content satisfies customers’ requests. As you know, we embed a help center right into your app as a widget, so that users can have simplified, unrestrained access to support without leaving the application. Our unique value Support Hero helps you improving your support resources to educate your users over time.

Who uses Support Hero? Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using Support Hero?

Support Hero is perfect tool for any growing company that want to help their customers successfully use their product and educate them with a super simple knowledge base. We have clients from early stage startups, big startups like Agorapulse, Thinkific, Kissmetrics and Mailerlite to enterprise companies like Weekdone and others. You can see a sample of our clients here http://www.supporthero.io/customer.

Depends on the size of the company but our main users are customer support agents.

How are your customers using Support Hero? Could you share a few different use cases?

It depends from customer to customer. It may be interesting to share our experience on analytics focused on how users search for support. As a Saas founder, fine-tuning support is one of top priorities. To do that, what you needed was analytics focusing on how your users were searching for answers in our help center, how many of them were find their answers and how many didn’t.

After 3 month of using Support Hero’s analytics, our clients decreased the level of inbound support tickets just by leveraging the insights provided in it’s support resources’ analytics.

From the user point of view, speed and finding right articles at the right time (on the right site) is crucial. Luckily, we allow clients to have contextual self-help support tool, which helps users at the right moment they need it, with the answers they are most likely looking for.

95% of users will leave the app if they can’t find the answers to their questions in less than 1 minute. With Support Hero, companies can embed their Help Center within the app so they can find answers without browsing your help center or even worse, leaving client’s page.

Have there been unique use cases for Support Hero that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

That’s a great question! Support Hero does not automatically build your FAQs or knowledge base, but it helps you a LOT creating the right support content. It basically records every search queries your users performs when they look for answers and tells you if they found an answer for the query. If you didn’t have the relevant content for that query, you can just create it, and if you had content but the user couldn’t find it, you can just add the relevant keywords.

One of our clients launched new version of their product. Polished, brand new design, new on-boarding. Once live, their on-boarding conversion rate dropped by 5.5%. They had increased amount of queries that went something like: “How to create profile?” which gave them a sign that new on-boarding wasn’t so well thought after all.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

Customer success! Talking to first clients, like you are building product just for them. Actually you are building it just for them.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

Figuring out who is the right person to talk to and figuring out what value we’re providing. Pricing is something you have to be careful from day one and I think most Saas companies are struggling with it. In the early days, we tried to focus on one segment of clients / pricing plan to avoid confusion.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added?

Definitely new WordPress integration.

Finally, What are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

Slack: Our team is half-remote and Slack is the only way we communicate and it also integrate with others (google docs, zapier, etc.) Pretty simple!

Google Docs: Storing all the documentations.

Zapier: Simple to use! We use many zaps that connect our apps, so they can work together.

Support Hero: To deflect support tickets and to learn from our clients…

Intercom: For customer engagement.

Originally published at siftery.com.

Educate your customers through self-help support was originally published in Product Coalition on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Kevin William David interviewed Jānis Sprenne, CEO at Fulfilli to know more.

Hi Janis, So tell us about what you are working on?

In the digital agency space, everyone silently is aware that they are in a tough business with lots of work and almost non-existing profits. Our focus is to work with agencies and to automate their administrative processes, which can take up to 40% of their resources.

Fulfilli is the first and only dedicated price quoting software and pricing automation tool for digital agencies. And we are currently also investing in R&D to eliminate the work we waste on non-billable activities like lead acquisition, project briefing, cost estimating.

Tell me more about why you are building this?

Before starting Fulfilli, I and my co-founder Matiss Berzins had been running a digital agency in Europe and we were really good at what we were doing — building products and marketing them. We automated lead acquisition for our own agency and started receiving so many new leads that we got to a point where one-third of our staff were doing lead processing and price quoting. I knew that 90% of that time is wasted as the majority of leads are not following through. We saw the opportunity to automate price quoting and save thousands of dollars per month for our small agency alone.

The research “Agency Pricing & Financials Report” done by HubSpot reveals chilling facts that 54% of agency owners and CEOs are not satisfied with their agency’s positioning, 72% with their sales process and 68% are not satisfied with their financial health. We need to fix this and we are doing that by learning best practices from the industry and building them into a product that everyone can use.

How is Fulfilli different from what already exists in the market?

Fulfilli’s closest competition is a proposal software and there are a few important reasons why we think Fulfilli is a better solution. Fulfilli quotes are structured to communicate an offer in a simple yet powerful way and are proven to improve client’s ability to understand the proposal that leads to higher conversion rates. You can create a Fulfilli quote much faster than a rich media proposal which saves times thus reducing costs.

Clients can’t easily compare these distinct rich media proposals from different agencies, but comparing offers is the only reason they ask more than one agency for a proposal in the first place. And the main reason why we think that in a near future Fulfilli grid-style price quotes will win rich media proposals is because pricing and quoting automation is possible only with a standardized and well-structured data that can be read, categorized and analysed by a machine.

Who uses Fulfilli? Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using Fulfilli?

Fulfilli is used by freelancers and small agency owners from around the world. We see different types of agencies from web development and SEO shops to inbound marketing teams. We are trying to keep up with feature requests from different customer segments because the quote structures and elements can differ a lot from one type of agency to another.

How are your customers using Fulfilli? Could you share a few different use cases?

As our goal is to save time and reduce costs, we’ve made our quoting software really simple and intuitive. Our customers use Fulfilli to create and distribute quotes and we build features around this simple idea to streamline their quoting and collaboration.

Have there been unique use cases for Fulfilli that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

We have had some interest from other industries like construction and wholesale and we are glad that these companies find value in our software, but our focus is on IT services outsourcing and digital marketing industries that we aim to disrupt by automating non-billable project management work.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

Our early success comes from our know-how to create an environment that drives conversions. Then it’s just experimenting with marketing channels that give us the best ROI. At an earlier stage, it was a lot of manual work to connect with agencies and to listen to what are they saying.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

We built the first quoting automation prototype early on, it was an awesome tool but it wasn’t scalable. It allowed us to automate the price quoting only for the services we used to provide when we used to be an agency ourselves. That’s when we realised we have to develop a self-service software for price quoting so that agencies can use their own wording for services and their own pricing. Now we do custom automation integrations customer after customer while we are building the self-service platform that we’ll be able to roll out to everyone.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?

Integrations with sales and other productivity tools are still in the pipeline and we see them as an important goal for the coming year that will drive lots of new customers.

Before we end, What are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

Segment— one integration to send all analytics tools and CRMs

Intercom — customer messaging and support

Hotjar— heatmaps and user videos

JIRA — project tracking

Gitlab — code versioning

InVision — design prototyping

Mixpanel— user analytics

Databox — dashboards to keep track of KPIs

Rollbar — caching application errors

Slack— team communication

Originally published at siftery.com.

Create simple, beautiful & powerful price quotes in minutes! was originally published in Small Business Forum on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Kevin William David interviewed Spasen Tzenov, CEO of ADSuisse to learn more.

Hi Spasen, So tell us about ADSuisse?

ADSuisse AG is a company that delivers special service for customer discovery, data validation, and cleaning. Our AI core is connected to over 1800 sources to find comprehensive information about one person. We can enrich already existing data with over 14 points (Post Address, Phone Number, Relatives, Social Profile, Workplace, Hobbies, Credit Ranking, Likes, ID Card, Education etc.) We really take care about data privacy and security. Our servers are placed in Switzerland and we are 100% GDPR compliant.

Tell me more about the problem you are trying to solve?

Our team has been working in big analytic companies and there we noticed a lot of incomplete data and bad customer understanding. For most companies, consumers are nothing more than names and numbers. With our service, we try to fill these gaps while digging the deep web and our 1800+ sources that are currently integrated into our AI core. Our service is available worldwide and this is also huge plus since most companies today interact on an international basis and need the correct shipping address, phone number, email address or relative to locate the right person. Corporations also need to further understand customers by knowing their habits and behavior.

How is ADSuisse different from what already exists in the market?

There are a lot of service providers such as Pipl.com that offer just a few data points, like address or e-mail enrichment. We deliver more than that from best possible sources. We are on the right way to help companies of any vertical understand their customers better with accurate and verified information. Our clients can integrate our service with all common CRM tools and enrich consumer data with information, provided by us.

ADSuisse combines all available services in the most valuable way. Doesn’t matter if you need just clean and verified data, or you need a full and enriched customer profile. We can deliver this through our comprehensive API.

All companies that store and handle customer data are facing the same problems: fake, duplicate or wrong data. This generates a huge amount of extra costs and even losses. We can improve marketing or retention campaigns by knowing what consumers like most.

Who uses ADSuisse? What types of roles do your customers have at their companies?

Our service is for every company that handles customer data. It could be a small block user with a sign-up list, a huge online retailer/e-commerce service, a telecom or debt collection company. We cover every vertical that is interested in the latest customer data. In the most cases, ADSuisse addresses its service to the Marketing/Sales Team and C Level Managers.

How are your customers using ADSuisse? Could you share a few different use cases?

There are different cases how our customers can use our service. We offer an option for small companies to provide us with data via excel or CSV file, or our API. While bigger companies prefer integrating our API. The data flow, by using API is, of course, faster and in both cases, we take care of the highest level of security!

The basic integration of our API doesn’t take more than 30 minutes without any serious programming background required. Everything is well documented on our side in a step by step guidance. To take an example, a big e-commerce shop from Germany use our Customer Discovery service for address research, to makes sure that their deliveries are always on time and in the right place. They are very happy how we handle their data. Actually, in less than one percent, we don’t find new information about consumers. In the rest 99%, we are quite successful. Another example is a marketing agency that uses our Customer Insights to optimize their campaigns. We provide them with a full social presence of a user and they can further analyze likes and shares. This is very useful to pop up the right advertising at the best possible place.

Have there been unique use cases for ADSuisse that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

Yes sure, there are always new things coming with a lot of questions to solve. We build this all from scratch and with a mixed team. It was nice to see this project growing like this. In the beginning, we had some problems with our backend, and the data transfer but this has been fixed. Another big point in our planning was to meet the GDPR regulations. This had an enormous impact on the planning and how we had to structure the data flow.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

There is no magic or golden era we found for our startup. We made a fixed and realistic plan on how to proceed and how we going to structure the company and the development. You need to do your homework with a lot of research on the business, the competitors and on the market itself. I believe sticking to the initial goals brings the best results. You should always be focused on the goals you want to reach, work hard on that and if this is not enough, work even harder.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

First of all, the biggest challenge was to meet with the coming GDPR this May. It had an enormous impact how we had to structure our service, the cross-border data flow, cloud-based storage and all that. This is a permanent improvement for us how to handle different cases, such as the right to be forgotten or the interaction between different countries.

What are the top 5–10 products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

We use the free Google Tools of course for our website and the SEO, for the sales we use HubSpot, it’s very user-friendly and I really like how you can arrange the tasks there. Regarding the development of our database, we are very satisfied with Elasticsearch. Regarding free traffic, I suggest searching for free PR share sites or sites that publish Start-Up news.

Originally published at siftery.com.

Discover your customers through data was originally published in ART + marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Kevin William David interviewed Raul Popa, CEO of TypingDNA to know more.

Hi Raul, So tell us about TypingDNA?

Simply put, TypingDNA recognizes people by the way they type. The way you type on your keyboard (both on PC and mobile) is unique and can be used for authentication. This is similar to how you identify a person by other biometrics like fingerprint, voice and other behavioral traits. The cool thing about typing biometric authentication is that it can be used in the background which creates a frictionless experience for the user.

Tell me more about why you are building this?

Traditional username and password alone are not enough. We see more and more attacks and hacks on the platforms we use daily to listen to music, do payments, chat with others and the list goes on.

We believe that a truly secure login authentication is a combination of something only the rightful person knows (login credentials) and is (biometrics) with no UX compromise. We engineered TypingDNA to let developers easily do that.

How is TypingDNA different from what already exists in the market?

First, compared to other 2FA like SMS (most used one to date), the user experience is greatly improved. You don’t have to switch devices anymore, get delayed SMS, pay an extra fee when you are outside of the country and so on.

Second, our customers discovered in their independent testings that our matching accuracy is higher compared to other companies that they tried. Also, we can achieve similar matching accuracy after seeing only 1 or 2 previous typing patterns of a user where other companies have to look at 5 to 10 previous samples at least. Last but not least, our customers love the easy to integrate API that we built.

Some of the similar companies are KeyTrac, BehavioSec, and BioCatch. They developed similar technology. At the same time, we face indirect competitors in the 2FA industry who use SMS or any other 2FA method.

Who uses TypingDNA? What types of roles do your customers have at their companies?

TypingDNA is used to prevent identity frauds in online banking, online learning and where second factor authentication is required. Roles vary from developers to CEO but for sure most of them have a technical background. B2D is actually our go-to-market strategy and it works.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

We recently launched the TypingDNA Authenticator which is a free authenticator that generates 2FA OTP verification codes right in your browser (no more switching to your phone) and is protected with your “TypingDNA” pattern. It’s the first app that is consumer oriented and uses typing biometrics as a security feature. We believe there is a lot of education to be done because a lot of people don’t know that such a feature exists. Ultimately, this will open a new market for us. It was featured as #1 product on ProductHunt and TechCrunch wrote about it which brought us a lot of exposure and signups.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?

The integrations we have with proctoring companies are really interesting, the fact that we can automate identity verifications in online exams is pretty valuable. Some of the largest universities are using our technology through the proctoring companies that integrated us. Being part of the emerging online education and helping make it safer and more affordable is something definitely impactful.

Finally, What are the products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

For marketing, we use apps like Hubspot (onboarding, email campaigns, CRM, etc.), SEMrush (SEO tracking) and all of the popular social media for advertising (wherever developers are).

Originally published at siftery.com.

Friction less authentication based on how you type was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Kevin William David interviewed Mikhail Trofimov, CEO at Reveal to know more.

Hi Michael, Can you tell us about what you are working on? What is Reveal?

Reveal is an professional Facebook Ads automation tool that provides lots of automation possibilities not available with native Ads Manager, as well as an advanced reporting tool.

Tell me more about why you are building this?

We had a successful experience of building Slack bot for our previous project, and we wanted to apply that experience to a new area that was not occupied by anyone else at the time. It turned out that ‘Facebook Ads + Slack’ was a perfect match (that’s where the ‘bot’ in our initial name comes from). So we built the first version of the product which received a warm welcome on Product Hunt but wasn’t commercially successful. Thanks to chats with our users and customer development interviews, we learned more about the main bottlenecks and decided to focus on Facebook Ads management part. And since automation tools at the time didn’t cover much of our users needs, we decided to come up with something that could solve that. So here we are now!

Reveal lets Facebook marketers free up a lot of time by automating routine processes that previously had to be done manually. You know, there’s always a better application of your work hours than just routine operations that can be delegated to an algorithm that’s never tired and never sleeps. Now hundreds of marketing managers save their time for analytical and strategic tasks with a help from Reveal.

What’s unique about what you are building & why do you think companies should use Reveal?

The FB Ads automation market is quite competitive, but there are only few more products worth mentioning: AdStage, AdEspresso, Qwaya, and Smartly.io. Reveal has the most advanced automated rules system among all of them.

Reveal lets you create a very sophisticated Facebook Ads automated rules with the tools we have: nested rules, advanced logging, parent elements metrics, metrics comparison within rules, hourly metrics etc.

Who uses Reveal? What types of roles do your customers have at their companies?

Every business with marketing activities on Facebook is our potential client. However, our typical customers are either agencies or ecommerce and their FB Ads spend varies from $10k to $1M per month.

Here are a few of them: AgencyY (marketing agency), Ubisoft (mobile gaming), Scentbird (ecommerce).

How are your customers using Reveal? Could you share a few different use cases?

Reveal use cases are pretty straightforward, we provide four main features for our customers:

• Automation: You set the rules and conditions for your ads and Reveal makes the rest of the work managing the ads
• Alerts: You set trigger conditions and Reveal alerts your team via Slack or email when the conditions are met.
• Custom reports: You can set up reports across multiple marketing platforms with metrics and custom schedule you want, get them in your email and Slack to stay on top of your overall marketing performance.
• Post boosting: Promote posts on your Facebook page automatically based on their organic performance.

Have there been unique use cases for Reveal that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

Some agencies are using Slack channels to send reports to their clients. We didn’t have this feature initially so had to implement a more advanced way of managing access to reports.

Some clients needed a way to base their rules on hourly performance of an ad. Since Facebook didn’t have such small time presets themselves, we’ve came up with the solution ourselves.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

There were no special hacks, we were pretty common things that most startups do. The most effective channels were:

• Product Hunt which generated some hype on the early stage but didn’t lead to any commercial success.
• Growthhackers brought a fair amount of new customers after posting some interesting content about the product.
• AppSumo held a promo campaign with us that helped us acquire lots of customers last fall.
• There are also a few influencers who like our product and promote it in their own FB Ads master classes.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

We’ve started with just sending alerts and reports to users work chats (Slack). That was fun, but there wasn’t any product-market fit and we had to make additional steps until we found it. We realized that people weren’t ready to pay just for an alert bot, so we made a pivot to a full-scale ad management system and the product found its customers.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?

The most important integration was the one with Slack. That’s what we’ve started with and it has always remained one of our main product features. Slack featured Reveal in its App Directory’s main page and has added it to the Brilliant Bots category.

What are the top 5–10 products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

That’s a pretty common list of tools, we use Mixpanel, Slack, Asana for internal and analytical stuff, and Intercom, Stripe and Github for running the project itself. You can check out the full list here at Siftery.

Originally published at siftery.com.

Optimize your ad management routine and boost your return on ad spending was originally published in ART + marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Kevin William David interviewed Zsolt Kocsmarszky, CEO at PingPong to know more.

Hi Zsolt, Can you tell us about what you are working on?

PingPong is a user research platform to easily find and schedule people from all over the world for user interviews and testing.

PingPong takes the pain out of user research by sourcing, recruiting, screening, scheduling, and simplifying other time-consuming administrative tasks.

Tell me more about why you are building this?

I used to work on a very niche B2B product where we conducted a lot of user research. Finding the right people, screening them, scheduling sessions, recording the interviews, storing them, transcribing videos and paying users an incentive was a massively, time-consuming process. This is also a very tedious process that caused a lot of headaches.

I was really surprised that there was not an integrated solution for these problems already, so I started building a product that allowed me to conduct the same remote user research much faster and in a more streamlined way. That’s how PingPong started 2 years ago.

How is PingPong different from what already exists in the market?

Imagine that you’d like to talk to people who will not only use your product, but you want to talk to people from Singapore and Thailand and Germany. You can do that within minutes, or a few hours at most, with PingPong.

Our process in entirely automated and more streamlined than anything on the market.

PingPong also focuses on the entire user research process from end to end. Our tool doesn’t just provide one of either recruiting or screening or scheduling or video calling, we have everything covered in one easy to use place. PingPong also runs in web browser and we’re keeping it affordable, especially when we’re talking about international user research.

Who uses PingPong? What types of roles do your customers have at their companies?

PingPong’s main audience is UX professionals with a strong focus on user research: UX researchers, UX designers, and Product Managers. We’re specifically working with these people since they are already familiar with moderated research (when you have to be on a call with the user and talk to them); they know first-hand the tremendous value that PingPong can provide.

How are your customers using PingPong? Could you share a few different use cases?

One very typical use case is a customer who already has a big product and which is already on the international market. PingPong provides quick and easy access to lots of foreign users, users from Asia, Europe and America, for example. PingPong just makes it convenient to talk to people from these regions and conduct user interviews and user tests.

Another use case I often see is that product managers want to introduce a more consistent and leaner user research: talking to users regularly is something many user-focused companies are looking to do, but so far, the manual, slow, and time-consuming process couldn’t justify doing it. PingPong offers an integrated solution for this, and product managers and Heads of Product have found us invaluable.

Have there been unique use cases for PingPong that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

I was a bit surprised when a student who was pursuing UX studies contacted me for a user research he was assigned. I was pleased to see how well PingPong fitted for this, too. If I think about it, it shouldn’t be super surprising, but when I created PingPong, I wasn’t thinking that students might use it :)

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

I’m quite crazy about user research and I’ve interviewed over 100 UX researchers, UX designers, and product managers to learn even more about the research process. Having an even deeper understanding of the topic, more than just my own frustrating experiences as a designer, has definitely helped us to build a product that’s filling a gap in the research process.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

Figuring out what features to build and how to build them is a constant challenge. With more customers and more feedback, we’re improving on this day by day and now we have a much clearer understanding of the needs of the UX community. But at the beginning, when you have just a few people using your product, it was definitely tricky.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added?

Implementing TokBox for our video calling feature was probably the most challenging. Their product is amazing but when it comes to integrating it, there is still a lot for you to figure out and that’s just a rabbit hole :) On the other hand, it was also the most impactful integration for our product. Now that we can host the video calls, we have so many more opportunities to provide greater value for our customers: recording the videos is trivial, but offering automatic transcriptions on 110+ languages and dialects is a massive feature.

What are the top 5–10 products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

• Trello — We use Trello to drive our product development. What I really love about Trello is that it’s like an operating system: you have basic elements that you can use in the way you’d like to use them. This makes it really powerful and gives you just enough flexibility but also limitations, which, at the same time, you need.
• Postmark — Since transaction emails are a critical part of our communication, having a clear overview about what’s going can help in unexpected ways. Postmark provides 100% transparency about your email messages that can be extremely valuable.
• HubSpot — HubSpot for sales is like Trello for product management. I’m really in love with HubSpot design and UX and I think they got a lot of the details just right. They make handling sales and leads fun and easy.
• Intercom — Their in-app chat is massively useful to help prospects and customers with day-to-day questions about using PingPong. Again, super fun and easy.
• Revolut Business — Revolut Business offers a 21st century alternative for traditional banking. Their product is simply amazing and you don’t have to deal with outdated ways of traditional banks anymore, which is a massive time saver. We have our bank accounts here and we have been super happy since then.

Originally published at siftery.com.

Effortless remote user research was originally published in Product Coalition on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Kevin William David interviewed Nav Nouhi, Chief Revenue Officer at Supernova to know more.

Hi Nav, So tell us about what you are working on?

Supernova is a design to code platform with the mission to accelerate the app development workflow for mobile designers and developers. Supernova Studio allows for flawless conversion of app designs into native iOS, Android and React Native code.

Studio converts Sketch designs within minutes, into native and production components such as buttons, labels, images, tables and more. That’s just the beginning, Studio employs highly advanced heuristics and analytics allowing for automatic export of assets, localizations, animations, code.. and more, without a developer.

Supernova Cloud is Supernova’s collaboration platform, where designers and developers can gather feedback directly from their teams or clients, make adjustments and repeat the process until satisfied. Contrary to other collaboration solutions, Supernova Cloud allows users to review real working apps, not prototypes, which are ready to be immediately converted to code, without compromise.

Tell me more about why you are building this?

Supernova started out of personal frustration as we were tired of the repetitive and tedious tasks of front end development. All of us have worked with mobile apps, in some capacity, so we’ve seen the possible variations of the same problems. We see Supernova as the game changer to an ever growing range of problems which plague the industry such as repetition, lack of time to truly polish apps or simply the entry level of knowledge required to get into the development (we see Supernova as a great educational tool for beginners).

The high and rising demand for developers. The only way to fulfill this demand is to add automation where it’s missing. Mobile development and the hand-off of designs to developers is a slow, tedious process and defeats innovations.

Supernova automates many of the standard developer tasks (resource export, design creation, responsive layouts) in a seamless way, fitting perfectly into the development process. Supernova produces production-ready code that can be then used to further iterate the app, saving countless hours.

How is Supernova different from what already exists in the market?

Native Studio by Neonto, Zeplin Avocode and Marvel. These are the primary tools used by designers and developers to create prototypes for clients or extract information from the designs (handoff) nowadays. Those tools are useful for prototyping, but none of them solve the primary challenge of handing over app screens in native code ready for developers.

Supernova delivers production code with native components. While all other tools animate images, we animate actual buttons and transitions. While some tools deliver code snippets, we generate entire screens using the latest technologies and standards. Supernova doesn’t interrupt one’s workflow but enhances it — by using Sketch files as the source of information and outputs assets currently delivered by a developer.

Who uses Supernova? What types of roles do your customers have at their companies?

Our target customers are mobile designers and developers. Our goal is empower designers to bring their designs to life without learning a single line of code and free up resources for developers enabling them to build innovative apps. Our customers could be freelancers, app development agencies, startups, enterprises, you name it. Really, anyone who has a mobile presence on iOS, Android or React Native.

Our customers are the individuals to really make it happen from a design and development perspective. They’re artists and engineers who take ideas and bring them to life in the form of mobile apps. By removing the hours of repetitive and tedious coding, we believe our customers will produce innovative and engaging apps.

How are your customers using Supernova? Could you share a few different use cases?

There are 2 main streams of users that use Supernova very differently — developers and designers. Developers use Supernova for a very fast hand-off that was not possible before. While other services would create you snippets for certain aspects of the UI, Supernova skips this step and generate the complete UI for that platform, freeing up developers to focus on code that requires creativity and human touch.

The designers on the other hand, now have ability they’ve craved for for a longest time — to bring the designs to life without learning to code. By building the entire UI-side, the need for unnecessary back-and-forth between developers and designers is gone — designers just hands-off the fully coded UI which the developer can build the backend.

Have there been unique use cases for Supernova that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

Amongst the usual use cases — the quick and precise conversion of the designs to actual, working apps, we have observed quite a few that we originally thought will be just an edge case — but now definitely prove that we’ve created a very versatile tool useful for a lot of people.

One of those is quick high fidelity prototyping in the startup world. Previously it took weeks to months, to even launch the most basic MVP but with the Supernova, designers are able to come up with several iterations of the app, weekly and effectively, not having to wait for any coding work to be done at all. Once the MVP is stable and finalized, coders can jump in and finish the backend integrations etc. — the work you only want do once.

Another very interesting angle, is Supernova’s ability to teach coders and designers how to create the apps properly. We have hundreds of designers who are using Supernova to learn basics of frontend coding just by experimenting, drawing different designs and reading through the output of Supernova. Same goes for students and people just learning about code for the first time. It is true that learning by example is the quickest way to grasp concepts quickly and Supernova allows for a whole new level of interaction — creating the educational materials for you as you learn.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

We wholeheartedly believe that building a strong product requires an amazing community and it has been our focus from the beginning. We’ve been there for our users when things were not working, working alongside them to make sure they are satisfied — even if it meant spending extra days working on a feature or bug to make one user happy.

Those are the people who became evangelists, good friends and gave us the best feedback we could ask for. Working with real people, without going “blind”, is truly the best way to get to know your user base and the path one’s product should take to become successful.

Always being completely open and honest has become our company motto. Our users know what to expect, what is coming and where we want to take it in the future. (Of course, we still keep some things as a surprise — because who does not like a good surprise?)

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

Contrary to some startups who can afford to launch with half-finished MVP, we fought the technology and many times we asked ourselves if it is even possible. The famous quote by Reid Hoffman “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late”, in this case, doesn’t apply to us.

Our developers and designers expect certain quality in terms of the code they are receiving and since so many companies failed to automate even the smallest aspects of the development, we had to make sure it was right.

For this reason, we worked on Supernova for nearly 3 years before the public beta release- and there were times where we just couldn’t continue. Ultimately, we made it to the finish line. Being persistent and laser-focused on the target was the single deciding factor of whether we’ll be successful or lost before we could even had chance to show it to anyone.

Finally what are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

We are an automation startup so we use quite a lot of automation ourselves — be it for emails, support or just to run day-to-day operations like deployment of the new versions. We use dozens of services because saving a few minutes of our time,is usually still worth it. Here are some of the products we’re proud to partner with:

• Slack We’ve built our entire community using the community channels alone and without it Supernova would not be where it is today.. Slack excels in the integration and simplicity of use for everyone.
• AWS & Google Cloud Engine to run our entire cloud services and web pages
• Firebase and now also Firestore to power our real-time services. We love this service, it allows us to iterate so quickly
• Stripe for the management of payments, invoices etc., all that is nearly impossible to built when time is short (and it always is in startup world)
• Intercom for the entire customer support. We had hundreds of people at once on our website, and our team is only 6 people, yet we still averaged out less than 3 minutes to respond to every single question — only possible by the great setup of the Intercom

Originally published at siftery.com.

Convert designs into native mobile apps in minutes was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Kevin William David interviewed Maros Kortis, Digital Marketing Professional at LinkMiner to know more.

Hi Maros, So tell us about LinkMiner?

LinkMiner is the freshest addition to the Mangools SEO tools package. After releasing a rank tracking tool last summer, our aim was to develop a tool that would not only cover another important task of search engine optimization but will also boost the synergy of our package.

And that’s how we started working on a backlink analysis tool in Q4 2017. Our users were asking for it as well. We pay a lot of attention to feedback, we shape our tools based on it so there was basically no doubt what will be our next product.

Tell me more about why you are building this?

Probably everyone who does SEO knows that link building is one of the most time-consuming tasks. The backlink analysis means browsing through a lot of data and the process of earning researched backlinks doesn’t depend completely on you.

That’s why we wanted to make the analysis more productive and the act of replicating backlinks of competitors less difficult. This was our top priority during the whole development of LinkMiner.

We released the first public version as a New Year’s gift at the beginning of January 2018 after beta testing in December. We are still collecting feedback and already have a couple of improvement ideas.

How is Linkminer different from what already exists in the market?

The main goal of LinkMiner is to help its users to find competitors’ backlinks that are easy to replicate thanks to incorporating a bunch of useful features:

• New metric
• Categories
• Embedded website preview with anchor placement
• Favorites list

We have developed a new metric called the Link Strength to calculate the power of backlinks. It’s based on SEO metrics, Alexa Rank and social signals.

Besides quick and advanced filters our aim was to categorize backlinks such as blogs, forums or Q&A websites. Knowing the category lets you immediately identify how hard it is to earn that backlink.

I personally don’t like opening each result in a new browser tab. Unfortunately, it’s a standard on the market. So we have split the main LinkMiner’s dashboard into two columns and added an embedded website preview with highlighted anchor placement. That means users can see behind metrics to evaluate the potential of backlinks.

Backlink analysis usually ends with data exports. Our plan was to create a tool that will enable our users to do the whole process in it. That’s how the Favorites list has been created. It’s basically a list in which users can save selected results.

We are not trying to compete with Ahrefs or SEMrush when it comes to generating our own data. We don’t crawl the internet in order to gain backlinks. The main data sources of LinkMiner are Majestic’s backlink indexes.

There are many other tools such as Linkody, OSE by Moz, or Monitor Backlinks.

Who uses Linkminer? What types of roles do your customers have at their companies?

There are many types of customers using LinkMiner as a part of our tools package. They are bloggers, SEO specialists, business owners, digital marketing and SEO agencies or even beginners learning how SEO works.

Some of the biggest companies using Mangools SEO tools are Skyscanner, Adidas, RetailMeNot or Alexa.

How are your customers using Linkminer? Could you share a few different use cases?

The typical use case is when a user wants to analyze their competitor in order to find the most valuable backlinks. That’s what the tool is primarily designed for. The added value of LinkMiner is that it helps to find results that are easy to replicate thanks to the above-mentioned features.

Have there been unique use cases for Linkminer that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

Though backlink analysis tools are designed for spying on competitors, many users tend to try them by analyzing their own domain. They did this in other tools in the past so they want to compare the results. It’s natural. The thing is that almost every tool offers its own metrics based on different data.

The term “replicate backlinks” is nothing new, however, from the so far received feedback we realized users aren’t used to it that much directly in tools.

Other than that, I don’t think there any unique use cases. We just need to put more emphasis on the fact that LinkMiner covers a bit more than the old-fashioned backlink analysis.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

I think it’s the whole mindset I mentioned in the earlier SERPWatcher interview. We do care about the product, its features, UX and design.

Then it’s all about our mission to make SEO reachable for everyone from very beginners to true professionals thanks to user-friendly interface.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

First of all, it was all about deciding which data sources we will use. There are 3 or 4 major backlink data providers.

Another challenge was the embedded website preview panel in the right part of LinkMiner’s dashboard. For example, there was an issue we couldn’t display “http” websites because our sites are “https”. There was a lot of stuff we had to keep in mind and fix accordingly as the tool fetches and then displays thousands of websites.

Yet, it can still happen we aren’t able to display some because its server is down, the SSL certificate has expired, or other situations we simply can’t influence.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?

Currently, we are thinking about how to make the best of backlink indexes of our data provider.

Before we end, What are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

When it comes to the whole company, we run our business on Amazon Web Services. We do use Google Analytics Suite, Webmaster Tools and other tools for analytics.

LinkMiner itself is based on AWS as well and its main source for backlink data is Majestic.

Originally published at siftery.com.

Find backlinks of your competitors you can replicate easily was originally published in ART + marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Kevin William David interviewed Jeri John, Senior Product Manager at Zoho Cliq to learn more.

Hi Jeri, So tell us about Zoho Cliq?

Zoho Cliq is a chat software built exclusively for business operations. Businesses have employees, customers, vendors, partners … This software works as a communication medium to facilitate collaboration between employees, as well as vendors and partners.

Chatbot Conference

Tell me more about why you are building this?

Like all our products, this started with a challenge we faced in house. At Zoho, we have been using emails, messages, cellular calls and we also have one-on-one meetings at conference rooms within the company premises. These meetings usually happen with an agenda but not everyone knows the context. We meet and then someone sets the context, then the agenda and then we take the decision.

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In such a scenario, it was tough when someone joined in the middle of a meeting, or for that matter in the middle of a project, to understand the context of the communication thus far and come to speed.

Communication cannot be something where a few people come together, talk something and after that both the discussion and the context is lost. This is not good for achieving results.

With a tool like Cliq, we have built something in which contextual communications are not lost and can help in achieving results. Also, it is built on the most interesting of human interactions — chat.

With Cliq, businesses don’t have to worry about setting up an email server or phone exchange or video conferencing or any of the other communication related overheads. We will cover all those overheads for the clients. All they have to do is use our software.

How is Zoho Cliq different from what already exists in the market?

Among smartphone users, the one category of Apps that is most used is Messaging. People interact most with messaging Apps and time spent on it compared to other categories is substantially more. So we built Cliq as a business chat platform that also plugs into other business tools in functions like CRM, Help Desk, IT Asset Management, etc. It integrates well with nearly 30 plus Apps within the Zoho suite and is available as a chatbar in the bottom. This is unique and I don’t see anyone else in the market doing this. Another advantage is the platform. Cliq provides an extensive platform to connect it with the internal tools that a business might already have. A good example I can cite is that I get a message in a bot whenever I get a mail at my office.

Who uses Zoho Cliq? Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using Zoho Cliq?

The product was only launched a month ago. It might be too soon to tell, but from what we’ve seen from the initial sign ups, our customers seem to be coming from different industries. A couple of them that stand out are SaaS companies and marketing agencies.

How are your customers using Zoho Cliq? Could you share a few different use cases?

This is again too early to talk. But like with all the products from within Zoho catalogue, we at Zoho are the first users of the software. We have been using it across the organisation for over a year now. Cliq has been tested by people in different roles right from the management to IT admins, to new joinees.

Have there been unique use cases for Zoho Cliq that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

We are hoping to learn as more and more people adopt the software. Again, early days. We have done some early access testing with a few companies and there has been good feedback.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

Cross-selling has been an effective growth hack opportunity. Zoho has 30 million users and most of them love a chat tool that works with their favorite Zoho application. Listing the product on Product Hunt got us really good visibility as many people trust Product Hunt.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

The biggest advantage of how we build software within Zoho is that we don’t work towards any set deadlines. We don’t ship until we are happy with the product ourselves. That said, I would say the biggest challenge was in building a software that could meet our own requirement -5,000 employees and offices in India, the United States, China, and Japan. Cliq definitely met our requirement.

Finally, What are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

Zoho runs it’s sales, marketing and finance operations entirely only on Zoho app, we don’t use any 3rd party apps. Zoho CRM, Zoho Campaigns, Zoho SalesIQ, Zoho Cliq and other 30+ apps in the required functions.

Originally published at siftery.com.

Keep up with your team, no matter where you are was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.