25. Paid Feedback and Sales/Retention Talks
Feedback is valuable, why not pay your users for their time?
Problem
Understanding and talking to your (potential) customers is one of the most important parts of building a business.
Getting into contact can be difficult, especially early on. Time is valuable, also for your customers. There needs to be something in it for them to want to talk to your scrappy startup.
Solution
A SaaS business that makes the process of paying customers for their feedback trivial. Customers sign up, copy a widget onto their website, and set up the offer. It could be something plain such as $20 for a 15 minute call, or 1000 free credits added to your trial.
The platform takes care of the entire process, from picking a time slot, setting the requirements for participants, to the redemption of the reward afterwards.
Learning from leaving customers is another angle: perhaps some would be willing to spend 15 minutes with you for $50, and you will learn which competitor they went to and why.
Inspiration
In a talk by one of the ScrapingBee founders they mentioned that this was a highly effective way of actually learning about what their customers were using the service for. They offered credits for their scraping service, but other rewards may work just as well.
Business
The target audience for this platform are high sticker price SaaS companies, but also fledgling indie businesses. The platform can charge for credits in a pre-paid way (e.g. $50 for 10 calls with rewards, not including the reward).