Philosophy
Organically the describing Startups grew out of the mail business. Definitely, mail is a tool that plays a key role in business communications and will for a long time remain the application that an employee opens first on a laptop desktop at the beginning of the working day (analytics of the use of communication channels by users). Company’s development strategy lay in the area of building working communications (the Calls module appeared) and business components – Support, Files (although the latter is more of a system history). In the last development vector, we started with the User Support module and plan to release Task manager in the future. Support in itself is BPaaS, and with a big stretch it can be argued that these are communications (the sequence of changing standard paradigms will be outlined later).
The last module in our bundle is Files (File storage), and we see it as a communication tool, including employees not only storing files, but also actively exchanging files, links to them within the company through folders and links with partners and clients. Thus, we have gathered around a single service the communication components of various work tools and automation areas, adding to this the possibility of collaboration – Global Address Book, Shared Employee Calendars, Shared Folders.
When discussing the development strategy, positioning and functionality of the product, we tried to single out communication components from each created module and unite the product packaging around them.
This does not mean that we just took and turned the world upside down – this means that we can see the world from a special angle. For example, here’s how it was with “Support”. Everyone understands that in large companies, support is the fulfillment of Pink Elephant standards, which determines the customer support process – in the context of the responsible executor, the time of the application, etc. In our solution, we simplified everything, focusing on convenient receipt of an application from a client through several channels – through the general support address and the form on the company’s website. In addition, we have simplified the hierarchy of responsibility – all employees of the company can respond to support requests and visualized communication in the general chat, when all requests fall into the common space of the system interface. With such approaches, we won in several main points – we simplified the understanding of the work tool, removed unnecessary functionality for a small team, made a decision in a short time without losing the quality of automating the needs of small teams. In fact, we abandoned the implementation of employee hierarchies (executor-manager pair) and abandoned a large part of the functionality – administration of access rights.
Implementing “Support” in our case is allocating an email address and inserting a script on the company’s website – everything is ready!
Where we didn’t want to go when developing the service.
• We did not include UC-specific chats and video calls in the solution. In this case, we have turned into another conservative product and strongly wanted not to be limited by the conservative classifications of software solutions for business.
• Didn’t want to compete with Skype or multiple video conferencing services
• We did not go into the socialization of services, realizing that in companies focused on operational activities – chain stores, HORECA, there is no place for likes.
What did we get
a simple multi-level communication service for employees within the company, with customers and partners. Examples of communications are
• Sending an email
• Call from browser
• File sharing links
• Acceptance of requests to the support service through the forms on the company’s website
Examples of System Blocks
– Mail client interface
– Calendar
– File storage
For whom we have made a service
For small b2b companies that have:
• client or service business
• in the structure of which there is an internal support service
• there is a need to organize communications with contractors
• there is a task of entering part of the data into third-party cloud storage
About our strengths
• Web generation
• Beautiful and simple interfaces. We didn’t write manuals for users, but made the process of work and settings so much easier so that my 4-year-old daughter could work with the service (at least with mail, dragging files into the email area, and not using multi-step clip-button attachment tools .
• From our technological advantages – Quicme is a multi-tenant solution, we have implemented a dynamic distribution of disk space within a tenant company
• use all the advantages of HTML 5 for work.
• We are fast – if you wish, you can experiment with many similar services yourself.
• In difficult closed test drives, we lose to the leaders. but we have a number of non-product advantages over them and about this in a private conversation.
We wrote about our policies in working with the partner channel, approaches to development and development in previous articles
• Experience with global hosting providers.
• Possibility of integration with technology partners
Today This SaaS startup is Business Mail Calls, Support, Files.
If it speaks about the company’s strategy in the market, then we rely on work through partners – I wrote about this in the previous parts of the article and on the launch of free mail services for domains and file storages in one employee’s work environment. We plan to provide up to 30 mailboxes for free – as we are focused on small businesses. The launch of the last service is scheduled for early summer.
In the comments, we would like to hear the opinions of readers of a respected resource about the service and perhaps try to change something based on these opinions. Thank you and in the next parts of the series of articles we will talk about failures in SaaS (not in our example).