Workshopping User Onboarding Problems

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Colleen's Heroku landing page: https://elements.heroku.com/addons/simple-file-upload

Michele Hansen  0:00 
So I got a pretty exciting email yesterday. We were nominated for the MicroConf SaaS Podcast Awards!

Colleen Schnettler  0:09 
That's amazing.

Michele Hansen  0:10 
In three categories.

Colleen Schnettler  0:13 
Wow, that's so funny, Michele, because when we started this podcast, I was pretty sure no one was gonna listen to it except for me. So I can't believe like people listen to it. I feel like a little uncomfortable that people listen to it actually.

Michele Hansen  0:30 
Yeah, we kind of expected it would just be like our husbands and some close business friends of ours. I'm totally floored and surprised and so honored that people are listening, and you guys nominated us and really, really, genuinely touched by that. So it's kind of a fun thing that's going on.

But there are also other fun things going on. With Colleen, because you're now in you know, the Heroku marketplace. There's people using it. And I think I saw you mentioned this week that you even got feedback from like somebody you don't know using it and they have something positive to say?!

Colleen Schnettler  1:13 
It's not my friend. Actually.

Michele Hansen 1:16 
that's always awesome.

Michele Hansen  1:19 
A total stranger using your thing. That's a milestone.

Colleen Schnettler  1:20 
That's a milestone. So I feel like this is just a really exciting time in terms of launching a product. So the product has been in beta, I think for about seven to 10 days. And as of this morning, 31 teams have signed up,

Michele Hansen  1:38 
Dude!

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, but...

Michele Hansen
You're a third of the way there!

Colleen Schnettler  1:41 
Well, 31 teams have signed up, but they're not all right, that's true for the I have to get 100 like I'm a third of the way there. But what is interesting about this is the way the Heroku cycle works. So if you are in the Heroku marketplace, you're going to search for I don't know file upload, you see my you see my add on, you click a button to install it. Then, if you want your personalized instructions, you have to go to the dashboard for your application, and click on it again, in your application. And that's the single sign on. So they provision the application which they can use it without ever doing single sign on. But most people use single sign on because then the directions are personalized with their API key. So of those 31 people 13 have actually made it to single sign on. And of those 13. Six have actively uploaded files. So for like a week, I'm feeling really good about these numbers.

Michele Hansen  2:42 
Yeah,

Colleen Schnettler  2:44 
I think there's just a huge benefit to being in like using this marketplaces attraction channel, I think that is just been a huge benefit. Because I know so many people who have launched products, and they literally cannot get anyone to sign up. And that would be that would be tough. So basically, what I'm doing is I don't get a contact email until they hit single sign on. Now there's one team that never single signed on. And they're just using the documentation from the Heroku. Doc's so good for them. So I don't have contact information for them. But the other 13 I do have contact information for so I have hand emailed all 13 of those contacts of the 13. I emailed three have emailed me back. So that's pretty good. Not bad, right? I don't know. Like I myself tend to ignore emails. So

Michele Hansen  3:37 
Like my feedback emails, I think the highest I've ever gotten the open rate to know the open rate is like something like 60%. But the reply rate is usually in the eight to 10% range. So that is good.

Colleen Schnettler  3:51 
Yeah. And I was just kind of asking, like, I just have an email. It's like, hey, do you need help setting it up? Let me know. So that's like, a really exciting first week. I mean, I feel like things are are going well, I've been hustling. Hold on. Wait,

Michele Hansen  4:05 
tell us what they said though. Like, don't skip that. I want to hear what these people had to say about it.

Colleen Schnettler  4:12 
So the first person had a feature request, which is like a totally reasonable request. The second person had the same feature request. And the third person. Yeah, I mean, it's okay. It's embarrassing. I shifted. Okay, now I have to tell you, so I shipped a file storage solution without giving you the ability to delete files.

Michele Hansen  4:34 
I mean, everything is a feature. Like we shipped a product without the ability to charge people

Colleen Schnettler  4:40 
It seemed like like, everything is a feature. I'm not charging them. So you know, it's not like they're paying for it. If I was asking them to pay for it, then yeah, I would have let them I would have shipped it with the ability to delete. But since I'm not charging them it doesn't matter.

Michele Hansen  4:57 
But when really get feature requests, like explicit feature requests for something specific, are our processes always, you know, whatever it is we always capture it. And so how this works for us is we just create an issue and GitHub related to intercom, it's not the cleanest way to do it, but it works for us. And then if somebody else or like multiple people ask us for it, then we look into it. So it's pretty interesting that you've already had two people asked for the same thing. Now granted, as you say, it's a fairly table stakes kind of thing. But it's, it's always interesting when you have multiple people asking for something, because that is pretty clearly indicates interest.

Colleen Schnettler  5:38 
Yeah, so I'm obviously gonna add that. I mean, I didn't add it for a very specific reason. And the reason I didn't add it is because I'm concerned, like if a user drops up, if a user adds a file, like let's say they add their avatar, and then they add, drop it again. Now, I don't know, why would they would do that. But let's say they do. So let's say they drop the same file twice, that actually gets saved in my service as two different files, because I have no way to know that that's the same file, because the font because I don't want to overwrite file names, right? Because your file might name might be avatar, and mine might be avatar, so I'm not overwriting files. And so if that happened, the developer who's implementing it is going to be saving the most recent URL in their database, so they can access that file in the cloud. If they then go into their admin dashboard, and they see two of the same files, and they delete one, and they delete the one they have linked in their database, then they're no longer going to have access to that file. Does that make any sense? I feel like I need to like whiteboard that. But basically, there's a way where if two of the same, same images get uploaded, but the URLs are different. And they have one database URL, one URL in their database pointing to the file and they delete the wrong file, that file will then be gone.

Michele Hansen  7:05 
So you're trying to make it sort of human error? Yes, fault tolerant, right? Yeah, they would have, like a timestamp or something to help them differentiate between them, like someone who has, you know, a scren shot ...