I don't know if this is quite public knowledge yet, so: human-assisted onboarding is sort of catching on at a lot of SaaS companies in the B2B space, at price points which are a bit north of the top end of typical 37signals/etc apps. (Squarely in the zone for this new product, though.)<p>A lot of people find it very, very difficult to get started from a blank slate. Automated onboarding/email sequences/video tutorials/etc gets you to a point, but it still leaves guesswork in the process and (candidly) one can always blow off a computer but blowing off a person who has been talking to you for weeks is socially harder to do.<p>This also allows you to do basically a hybridized product/consulting model, since if (without loss of generality) Jason Fried is spending 2 hours for you talking about your business' challenges as he gets you up to speed on KYC, that's essentially equivalent from the customer's perspective to "Rent Jason's brains", but (crucially) the majority of the economic activity actually comes from the product whose use is enabled by the mini-consult rather than through consulting itself. This lets it scale to the moon. (Also, as every consulting company at scale will tell you, you can have Jason Fried's insights on your company actually delivered by an understudy. 37signals certainly doesn't lack for smart people who understand the 37signals playbook.)<p>This is currently giving me fits, since I haven't figured out a great way to deliver it consistently for non-enterprise accounts given that I'm 14 time zones away from many customers, but it's one of the big things I'm working on currently. The word on the B2B SaaS grapevine is it works very, very, very well at moving $X,000 to $X0,000 per year SaaS accounts.<p>I'll blog about this if I ever manage to systemize it successfully. (As usual, the plan is 1) Throw stuff at the wall and figure out what works. 2) Write down what worked and execute against that plan. 3) Pay someone to do #2. I'm currently somewhere in stage #1.)
Is this a new writing style I'm unaware of or just plain laziness?<p>Get to the <i>point</i> blog writers!<p>Make your assertion clearly and right at the top, explain it if it could be misconstrued so that we know what the hell is being discussed.<p>Then go on to write about it.<p>It seems like every second blog post linked to here is a long rambling missive that only reveals the point somewhere minutes into reading it long after my eyes have glazed over.
Interesting...there was an article on HN recently that posited a major reason for the 'failure' of the Facebook Platform was an over-engineered attempt to mitigate spam and promote quality control through automation...instead of curating apps by hand, a la the iOS App Store.<p>(The article in question: <a href="http://pandodaily.com/2013/07/23/move-fast-break-things-the-sad-story-of-platform-facebooks-gigantic-missed-opportunity/" rel="nofollow">http://pandodaily.com/2013/07/23/move-fast-break-things-the-...</a>)
pg's original article was great, and it's nice that 37signals are along for the ride - but let's be clear, Jason's article is about "artisanal high-touch", not the real deal.<p>The real-deal looks like email lists, cron jobs, Google Docs, throwaway Ruby scripts, Access databases. It's operational and technical debt that's the least worst option. Artisanal high-touch has a bevelled drop-shadowed button saying "They paid us! Enter the transaction manually..." and full Campfire integration.
> human-assisted onboarding<p>Otherwise known as professional services. I think that's what some folks miss when they think about SAAS - it's going to be about service more than anything else despite the network delivery.
I've got two nitpicks.<p>1. Know Your Company is, at minimum, a $2500 service. The amount of time you can spend with a given customer is huge, in that respect, because the customer support you're doing for that one customer is proportionally much more valuable. If I have a SaaS offering billing out at $20/mo., how much time can I feasibly spend with a customer (of which there are multitudes) before I have to think of ways to avoid timesinks?<p>2. The "manually adding people to a database" thing seems contrived. It's valuable because you learn the departments and the employees: so what's wrong with automating the excel/email uploads and having the script spit out an org chart and dossier to the printer? (That isn't a rhetorical question -- wouldn't a birds-eye view of an organization be more helpful?)<p>(Overall, I absolutely agree with Jason's point! But I think the argument is a bit more nuanced than the way he presents it.)
I know the article is referring to b2b SaaS products, but we employed a version of this idea on Http://storifi.it<p>We already knew that people wouldn't know what the game was about, so we sat with each user individually and talked them through the onboard process. We learned alot of things we would not have otherwise spotted and then capitalised on that learning. The web app was just an mvp, but we incorporated all the learning into our mobile app which resulted in a 100% activation rate.<p>Next step for us is now to finish off the app and concentrate on user engagement for which we'll be following a similar philosophy.