I built a micro-SaaS as my pandemic side project:

TeamHome.app – An internal company directory designed for remote teams. Try it out and let me know what you think.

Read on for details & some background…

I did an interview for the Close.io Inside Sales Summit, a free 5-day virtual summit with perspectives from 50+ leaders on inside sales. Ryan Robinson interviewed me for an engineer’s perspective on topics related to sales, including how sales teams and engineering teams can work best together.

Watch the interview here: https://www.insidesalessummit.com/interviews/wednesday/phil-freo/

Below is an internal team post I wrote to help us at Close.io do a better job of capturing customer’s feature requests in a way that leads to better product development outcomes.

I’m sharing this publicly because I believe this advice can help other startups and SaaS product companies as well.

When a customer request for a new feature come in, it’s easy to not log it at all (“we’ve heard that one before”) or to log it in a suboptimal way. Here are a few details on how to best capture customer needs and why it matters.

The typical, but unhelpful, way

The most common way feature requests are logged is in a “light” format like this:

A common pattern in SaaS apps is to allow a free trial period of 2 weeks or 1 month, and then to require a credit card to use it any longer.

Either out of curiosity or out of a genuine need for a tool that some SaaS service is offering, I will often sign up for a free trial soon after learning about it in order to check it out. For a variety of reasons by the time the free trial is up, I’m not ready to purchase.

It could be because I was just poking around. But more often it’s because I got too busy. Or my reason for signing up didn’t stay a high enough priority to be ready to purchase and fully implement some solution. Or maybe because the product just wasn’t far enough developed to satisfy what I was looking for.

What I find happening is that 3, 6, 12, or 18 months later I’ll find myself thinking about this tool. Perhaps the problem that led me to originally check out tools of the service has become more pressing than ever before. Or perhaps I’m fed up with another tool I chose, and am searching again for a better option. Or I’m hoping that the product has evolved more. Or whatever.

When logging back into your previously-created account, what you typically see is something like this: