“Hello, this is awesome support”
Startup-ing is hard. You have A LOT to do. Especially in a small team. And when you have set the bar really high, like we have done in Viral Loops, the amount of fronts that you are fighting at the same time is simply never ending.
But being there when a startup makes its first steps means you get to do things the way you want to do them.
At Viral Loops we are big supporters of stealing like artists. We stand on the shoulders of giants, there’s no denying. Buffer, MailChimp, Intercom, Help Scout, Sharetribe. We admire their products, their teams and their culture and so, inevitably, not only our product but our own culture has also been greatly influenced by them.
Which is why in Viral Loops we wanted to provide amazing support from Day 1, like these companies do. Did someone just ask what amazing support means to us? Well, I’ll assume you did and just go ahead and tell you all about it. Stay with me.
“If you want to see the true measure of a team, watch how they treat those who haven’t added their credit card yet”. Anonymous PM
Awesome Support?
Now, there’s a lot of ways you can frame awesome support. Incredibly fast, always available etc. easily come to mind. While speed is our thing, we haven’t set targets for that yet (like Buffer did). And while you will most likely get a quick response if you contact us any crazy time during the day (or the night), we cannot promise our answer won’t come with a small delay.
Because let’s be honest, we’re a small team juggling a huge amount of tasks with meraki and avoiding any compromises in quality. So, if replying to emails while in bed isn’t our thing, what is it then that makes our support so f*cking special we’re writing a blog post about it?
Viral marketing is a strange beast. Growth hacking is even stranger. When building Viral Loops, we envision a platform that empowers businesses and individuals to grow their audiences, their user base, to raise awareness about their brand, all in an easy to use package that provides enjoyable UX (think MailChimp) and quick solutions.
To use a great tool is not enough. In order to succeed, viral marketing campaigns need proper nurturing.
But there’s no denying it, to use a great tool (Viral Loops) is not enough. In order to succeed, viral marketing campaigns need proper nurturing. You can’t just put them up and expect leads to flock to your campaign.
You need to promote your campaign, find the right audiences, create a nice landing page, find messages that convert and so much more.
And let’s not forget that the campaigns people create in Viral Loops are only just one part of their marketing efforts which may well extend in several other areas, online or offline.
Which is where we come in.
Viral Loops was born in a growth team. Our founders have been doing growth before it was cool and all of us are fascinated by growth problems. This is what we read about, what we think about. We are a group of people who first think as growth hackers, regardless of everything else that we do in this team.
Therefore, when any of our early-access users (from our pre-launch campaign, which you should join here) gets in touch with questions or feedback regarding Viral Loops, we instinctively put ourselves in their shoes. We try to understand their business and their goals and offer suggestions for helping them achieve those goals.
And that’s how we arrived to our definition of awesome support:
Awesome Support = Enable + Boost
Enable
Awesome support should be an enabler. You cannot control the way people will use your product. Some times it won’t work for them the way you wanted to, other times they might need something you haven’t thought of because their use case is more peculiar than you thought when you were designing it.
Supporting them in those cases is super important. No one needs another complication in their lives and a friendly contact with your team that can ensure them their needs are understood (even if they can’t be covered) is great comfort.
Boost
As we mentioned earlier, tools can only do so much. The rest is what you do with them and how you support your marketing efforts. There’s no point in creating an amazing Facebook ad that converts very well if your landing page is a leaky funnel. The great copy your wrote for your campaign won’t be seen if no-one can find the call-to-actions.
And I’m not talking only about supporting you for campaigns you have created on Viral Loops. Perhaps your product is suffering in some other way. Just tell us about it.
Over time we have advised our users (but also visitors of our website who just contacted us) by providing ideas for all steps of their funnels, from increasing acquisition to improving their CTRs to finding people to build a growth team.
Don’t take our word for it, Marcus Karoumi from 100 Snapchat Marketing Hacks had some nice things to say about our support process:
“I have used other platforms in the past but they were too ugly and expensive but this is on another level. Love the design of everything and how easy it feels. The team of Viral Loops provided me with great ideas for bootstraping my campaign and getting traction from the start!”
That’s what he said!
Our users’ users
Another aspect of our culture is that we should care not only for our users but also for our users’ users. Which is yet another reason why we should strive to be the company and the product with which businesses and individuals can create amazing viral marketing campaigns that are meaningful and valuable for their audiences.
Ending on a high note
Our friends and colleagues think we’re crazy. They ask us: does this scale? In all honestly, we don’t think so. But, at the same time, our reply to them is… “challenge accepted”.
The point is, as was very nicely articulated by Belle Beth Cooper on the blog of Buffer:
“People don’t buy products, they buy better versions of themselves”
Which means that you can’t just be the product. You have to help your users succeed. And surely your strengths lie in more areas than plain product development. You do know a lot about your specific domain of interest.
Don’t refrain from passing on that knowledge. Sharing is caring. It does take time from your other tasks but especially during an early stage, it can provide you with a great competitive advantage. Win-win!
So, how do you frame awesome support in your startup?
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