Satismeter: Meet the Founders

SatisMeter is perfect for online businesses that lack qualitative feedback from their users.
It’s an in-app feedback platform, that collects NPS data based on specific usage patterns. Unlike a traditional email survey or various in-house solutions, SatisMeter is an easy to integrate, multi-platform solution, perfect for small startups with only a few customers, all the way up to enterprise scale clients.

Satismeter’s current customers include BuzzSumo,  Udacity, Mention, Adroll, Dashlane,and MailJet. I sat down with the founders, brothers Jakub and Ondrej Sedlacek, to talk about Satismeter, and their unique team.

 

You two are not only Co-Founders at SatisMeter, but brothers. Have you always worked well together, or was that a later development? Is it an advantage to work with a sibling as a co-founder?

Ondrej: Before SatisMeter neither of us thought our professional paths would ever meet.
Even though we are brothers, we are quite different.
Jakub is a technical person and a product guy with experience of leading GoodData front-end engineering for five years. I, on the other hand, am a sociable person with a background in IT sales, marketing and NGO fundraising.
Jakub: Being brothers has a great advantage, in that we know each other well and we can rely on each other in good and bad times. We share the same values and because we have different expertise we complement each other well.

Tell us a bit about how you came up with SatisMeter.

Jakub: I worked in the [Czech founded and Prague and San Francisco based] analytics company GoodData before and we struggled with the direction of our product and keeping focus on what our customers need. We started collecting customer feedback and it helped us tremendously with further product development. I was surprised there was no such service that would help automate the whole process. That’s where the idea for SatisMeter came from.

How can SatisMeter be used to improve how SaaS companies develop new features or improve retention of existing customers?

Jakub:  SaaS companies live off of customer subscriptions. They need to keep their customers as long as they possibly can. SatisMeter can be viewed as a churn reduction tool. We identify unsatisfied customers, and let SaaS companies work with these customers before they leave for the competition.

Ondrej: Also, most online businesses do not get enough user feedback. They optimize the whole user experience and new features based on analysing the behavior of users, but know very little about the actual needs behind this behaviour.
SatisMeter gathers this feedback directly inside web apps and shares it back to the right people in the organisation. Unlike most in-house solutions, SatisMeter can send the feedback not only to Support, but also to CRM, Analytics and Marketing tools, as well as other communication channels like Slack. This way the feedback doesn’t stay trapped in some helpdesk database, and the whole organization can see what their customers think.

You signed some very prominent clients pretty quickly, like Buzzsumo, MailJet, Mention, and AdRoll. What do you think got you this early traction?

Jakub:  We made the service very easy to start with and let the users see the value immediately. Also, unlike many surveys on the market, we really care about the experience of the end-user – Satismeter doesn’t block them from working and let them fill in our pop-up when they have time for it. This is why Satismeter has a 30% response rates on average.
Ondrej: Our first users came from partnership with customer data hub Segment.com. For example Mention’s Head of Growth found us on the Segment marketplace, and build their churn reduction process around our NPS platform. Later he even wrote a blogpost about this process, and the word of mouth started spreading. Satismeter have also been featured on ProductHunt, which helped as well.

Have you seen any unexpected uses of SatisMeter since you launched? Something that surprised you?

Jakub: When we launched, we saw SatisMeter as a tool for Product Managers to help them build a product their customers need. It surprised us that most people interested in SatisMeter were marketers and growth hackers who wanted to optimize their growth metrics. We unlocked many creative uses by integrating with other platforms and letting our customers work with the collected data. We already took a lot these ideas and implemented them right into SatisMeter.

What’s the short term plan for Satismeter? Where do you want to be in 6 months to a year?

Ondrej: There are four areas where Satismeter will focus: new platforms, new markets, better understanding of user feedback and actionable advice. We want to cover all platforms where users are communicating with businesses and our mobile survey will be launched in March. We are working with several communication platforms to collect user feedback for their customers. Some of our customers collect tens of thousands of responses a month and we would like to give insight not only whether their users are satisfied, but why. Also we already know how to identify the customers with higher churn risk. We want to advise on how to work with them right inside SatisMeter.

Which players do you view as your biggest potential competitors in this market, and why?

Jakub: At the moment our biggest competition are companies that are collecting NPS using email surveys. A surprisingly large number of companies are still using email surveys, although it’s much less efficient than an in-app solution. There are also many platforms that are doing really nice survey widgets, but don’t work very well with the collected data. Satismeter is trying to focus on an easy to use solution that will help companies to dramatically improve customer retention.

Can you tell us some of the most common mistakes that SaaS companies make when surveying their customers?

Jakub: Common mistake is that they just survey users and don’t follow-up with them. It’s a great way to engage with your happy customers and opportunity to proactively resolve issues of the unhappy ones.

What are some of the most common misconceptions about how NPS is used, and how it works?

Ondrej: The most common misconception people make is to look at NPS score and ask “What does this number mean to my business”. The NPS score alone is an indicator of how satisfied and loyal your customers are, but every business segment, every culture and every country has different perceptions and thus different benchmarks. The right way is to watch the NPS trend, correlate it with product and service changes, and decide how these changes influenced your customers’ satisfaction.
Jakub: NPS can be also used in many other ways to improve your business, for example as tool for better conversion of trial users into paying customers, or a way for better targeted marketing campaigns.

Has StartupYard been a positive experience so far for the team? How has it affected your overall approach to the company so far?

Jakub: StartupYard is a combination of connections, knowledge and experience. This is invaluable for first-time entrepreneurs like us. The first month was intense but Satismeter moved miles ahead in vision of our product and company. We are really excited to see what’s coming next.