These three CEOs have collectively raised over 60M and have exited 6 companies. What's their secret to success? It's all in the customer feedback.
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Greg Reinacker, founder of NewsGator & Tradervue (present)
Reinacker knows the importance of pinpointing the right product features. Now on his second startup Tradervue - an automated trading journal and trading analysis tool for active stock, futures, forex, and options traders - he gets to test out his lessons learned from his time at NewsGator (Sitrion).
In 2004, Greg founded NewsGator - which is now a global software company headquartered in Denver that develops and markets collaboration software under the name Sitrion. It was initially a consumer company focused on RSS aggregation, before shifting its focus to the enterprise market. The company raised $12 million in funding in 2007 and acquired Tomoye in 2010.
What did your initial customers teach you about your product?
“Back at NewsGator (and this was a long time ago!), what I remember along these lines was all of the little things I had in the back of my mind that I wished I could have gotten in before shipping v1. These turned out to be the things that people would overwhelmingly ask about. The first follow-on release reflected a lot of work in these areas.”
How did your experience at NewsGator affect your approach the second time around?
“With Tradervue, my product philosophy was to try to deliver great functionality, but not every feature under the sun. Try to do fewer things, but do them well. I think this worked out well in terms of initial feedback - my very early customers were generally very positive about the product and the user experience, and the vast majority of early feedback was along the lines of ‘could you add X’. Over the years since then, I’ve added a lot of X’s, and it’s really become a pretty feature-rich product for the markets we support, while still remaining simple to use.”
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Bob Ogdon, four time serial entrepreneur & founder Swiftpage
With over 31 years of experience in the multimedia market, Ogdon has heard ample requests from his customers. Ogdon regards customer feedback as a mutually beneficial exchange: the customer gains features to create an optimal experience and his software evolves to find its true niche.
What have you learned about your business model and product through your customers?
“Our customers have completely pivoted our business. We began as an website creation company and one of our customers wanted to use the site that they created as their email template - this was at the beginning of html emails - and we looked at that and said ‘That is a great idea!’. We realized that email is more service-oriented and changed our model.”
“The more we’ve gotten to know our customers, the more we understand what they want. We have realized that small businesses are the master of their craft but terrible at marketing- they want to be told what to do. We developed a key, differentiating feature of our product based on that customer. Instead of graphics that needed further analyzation, we started providing a priority call list based on the open click data.”
How have you learned to distinguish what feedback is important?
“The main directions of our business have come from our customers but they don't know how to tell you to change your product, they just know how to tell you and distinguish what they like and don’t like, and the more you listen, the more you're able to identify the features that they really want. Listening is critical. By listening, we’re able to create a product that specifically answers the customer’s request.”
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Alan Sage, founder of Configuresoft and Digabit (present)
Alan Sage first founded Configuresoft in 2000, which quickly became a leading provider of server configuration, change and compliance management software and was acquired by EMC in 2009.
With Digabit, the team has realized the true customer match for their second product and has changed their target customer.
What are the top things your first few customers taught you about your product?
“With Digabit, we started as a SaSS firm geared towards smaller manufacturing firms. We shifted focus to larger enterprise companies because we noticed that they already had the backend infrastructure in place - they were more receptive to SaSS. Immediately we went from selling average deals to six figures.
“It was very opportunistic. We always had in mind that we wanted to appeal to the larger companies but one of our largest customers (one of the largest manufacturers in europe) pushed us through the maturation process quicker. They pushed us to build out features and this skyrocketed our average sales.”
What features did you change and alter over time?
“For Digabit, we started out as a high-end equipment library for manufacturers. It was apparent that they needed help getting content into the system. We ending up building out a whole new product- an offering suite for content to help them populate our web portal. It was unexpected. We thought the problem was largely solved but what we found is that the problem wasn’t solved as all.”
Want to share some of your lessons learned? Email [email protected]
