[NOTE: This article was originally published on Siftery’s website. You can find it here.]
Receptive enables companies to make data-driven product decisions by translating demand from customers, internal teams and the market into actionable insights.
Kevin William David interviewed Hannah Chaplin, CEO of Receptive to know more.
Hi Hannah, Let’s get started. Can you tell us about what you are working on?
Sure! Working out which features to build is a critical business decision for every software company; time and resources are finite and no one wants to waste money or time creating features that don’t grow revenue, increase retention or fail to deliver strategic value.
Building the wrong features negatively impacts growth and valuations yet making informed product decisions is a real challenge. Receptive was born out of experiencing these issues first hand and we built the product to answer the question at the heart of every software business:
“What is the highest-impact thing I can work on right now given my limited resources whether that’s people, time, or money?”
We are the leaders in Product Demand Intelligence enabling SaaS companies to make data-informed product decisions by translating demand from customers, internal teams and the market into actionable insights.
Tell me more about why you are building this?
Quite simply — it was a huge pain point in our last SaaS business. We couldn’t scale easily because there were so many competing & conflicting voices when it came to understanding which features were going to have the biggest impact and help us reach our goals.
We had data all over the place — in spreadsheets, Trello, Intercom etc… we didn’t understand the priority of requests we received and it was really hard to keep our customers in the loop. By bringing all the product data together in one place and making it really easy to segment and communicate we were able to start delivering work we knew had a positive impact on our customers **and** aligned with our strategy. Game-changer!
Our beliefs reflect the problems we solve for SaaS organizations. We believe all software companies should have:
The power of data: Up-to-date and prioritized demand data from customers, teams & the market
Segmentation: The ability to easily segment data to truly understand product demand (what your Enterprise customers need it very different to free triallers, for example!)
Communication & Transparency: Seamless communication from leadership down, between teams and with customers & prospects
Automation: Smooth workflow between teams & systems and product teams that don’t spend their time on manual process
Who are your top competitors & how is Receptive different from what’s already exists in the market?
Our biggest competitor is definitely the spreadsheet! Most organizations we work with (mid-Enterprise SaaS) are undertaking hundreds of hours of manual work each month to collect and understand product feedback from customers, internal teams and their prospects. The process involves a lot of spreadsheets and data also being spread across bug tracking, project management and support software too.
A large part of what we do is to show SaaS teams that there is a great way to handle and use this data to drive the growth of the organization. Receptive is unique because it’s the first time Product Demand Intelligence has been used in the SaaS/software sector.
Companies should use Receptive if they want to take the politics and gut feeling out of product decisions. If you want to know what to build, why you are building it and who it’s for then Receptive is for you!
Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using Receptive?
Mid-Enterprise SaaS organizations across the globe are using Receptive to ensure product decisions align with their company strategy.
We usually start out helping overwhelmed product, support and customer success teams collect, measure and understand product feedback. After that, Receptive very quickly gets used by roles across the whole organization because of the data insight and strategy elements of the product.
How are your customers using Receptive? Could you share a few different use cases?
Customers are using Receptive to make data-informed decisions so all pieces of product development align with the organization’s strategy.
There are many other areas we help with too. Some good examples are communication & transparency with the customer base, using product feedback in the development of new markets & products and the creation of product roadmap that really work for everyone. Here are some recent case studies:
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How Receptive Revolutionized the Roadmapping Process at Magnus Health
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How Beatroot Saved 50 Hours a Month on Feedback Management with Receptive
Have there been unique use cases for Receptive that you hadn’t thought of or expected?
There have been a few times we’ve been contacted about use cases far outside what we do. For example, using Receptive in politics to understand the priorities of voters!
We are remaining focused in SaaS/software but with each new customer or prospect comes a wealth of insight into process and areas we should be thinking about that exist within our use case. Luckily, we also use Receptive so use this data to inform our product decisions.
Have there been unique use cases for Receptive that you hadn’t thought of or expected?
There have been a few times we’ve been contacted about use cases far outside what we do. For example, using Receptive in politics to understand the priorities of voters!
We are remaining focused in SaaS/software but with each new customer or prospect comes a wealth of insight into process and areas we should be thinking about that exist within our use case. Luckily, we also use Receptive so use this data to inform our product decisions.
Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?
From day 1 we wanted to provide as much value to people as possible. We wanted to learn from others and share our knowledge so we put out a lot of content — blog posts, Quora answers, webinars, ebooks. We didn’t ask for anything in return, just provided awesome content and got involved in as many conversations as possible. This helped with early traction and this type of content/customer development is still intrinsic to Receptive today.
What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?
In the early days, we were solving our own problem set. The challenge was to see if the issues we were experiencing were also pain points in other SaaS organizations.
We solved this by undertaking a customer development project over several months. We didn’t develop the product past prototype stage until we truly understood the pain points that really mattered to our target market.
Hiten Shah and his business partner, Marie, are doing a fantastic job of this stage at the moment. You can sign-up to Product Habits to learn more.
What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added?
Because we track the priorities of our prospects in Receptive, it’s been really easy to understand which integrations we should add.
2-way integrations with JIRA, Zendesk and Salesforce have been huge for us and integrating with Zapier to open us up to a further 500+ apps has been very beneficial too.
Each integration has had an impact in a different way. As well additional exposure through the marketplace or app store channels, each integration has helped us better service teams within SaaS organizations; JIRA for product & dev teams, Zendesk for support & customer success and Salesforce for sales.
Finally, what are the top products that you depend to run the company & how do you use them?
All of our documents (content, processes, research, etc.) are in Google’s G-Suite. We all use that a lot as we’re able to easily share documents and collaborate.
For internal communication, Slack proves invaluable. It’s just a really easy way of keeping everyone in the loop, and different teams can all have their own conversations.
Hubspot is a must-have for our sales teams — it streamlines the whole process and integrated beautifully with Gmail. Tasks that used to take a lot of manual time using a previous CRM have completely disappeared.
From a more technical point of view, we love Amazon Web Services for all our infrastructure & monitoring and GitHub for version control and issue tracking.
