Ask HN: My attempt at empowering companies to make better product decisions

>> "I checked the website, looks promising so congratulations on that. I do have a comment, your entire website is still linking to your Heroku subdomain."

I hear you. We were being as cheap as possible and didn't want to pay for SSL certificates, etc. while building early version of the product. But we're hearing this more and more, so perhaps it's time to move on :)

>> "If I'm not mistaken, this pretty much feels like A/B testing with the implementation being a survey."

It's interesting and refreshing to see someone else boil down our product. Thank you!

So I agree that it "feels" like A/B testing because you're adding a new element (and potentially removing it based on our rules engine). But it's unlike A/B testing because our tool is not designed to split your traffic across page variations.

Here's what I would add to your distillation: it's being able to ask the right user, the right question, at the right time. And this is where our product is like a "hyper targeted survey".

>> "So have you tested users' sentiments about trying to use a feature only to realize it isn't implemented and then being promoted to answer a few questions? I'd speak for myself, I'd rather not see a button to for example Authenticate with my Twitter account if it doesn't work, than to see one of which when I try to use it, I get asked a few questions. I'd feel that's a bummer."

Absolutely. This was our primary risk. After user testing, we're finding that this concern is more of a theoretical anxiety than actual feeling in practice.

>> "To that point, why would I use FeatureKicker instead of a service like Qualaroo, which works fairly well."

I think the tools and use cases are different.

With Qualaroo, you get a pop-in question based on a timeout, and those questions are typically related to overall customer satisfaction or net promoter score. But we believe that using Qualaroo to ask a specific question about a specific feature on a page will not work as well as FeatureKicker. Why? Because the question may be irrelevant to whatever the user is doing at that time. This gets even trickier when you want to ask a question about an unbuilt feature. Then you have to worry about showing the experimental feature only sometimes and coordinating your Qualaroo question to pop-in when you're selectively displaying the experimental feature.

In contrast, FeatureKicker allows you to ask the right user, the right question, at the right time. Let me unpack that. It's the right user because it's the person using a particular (built or unbuilt) feature. It's the right question because you're going to ask something relevant, specific about that feature. And it's the right time, because you're capturing the user at the point of interaction, which is the peak of their curiosity. We believe this explains why we're seeing up to 64% response rates to our clients' questions.

We also have javaScript API's which can be used to show an overlay. Here is an example of it being used after a customer does a search: "It asks customers, do you like the search results? and can we improve our search feature?"

I have one beta customer showing overlay after 90 seconds have passed on the "buy-now" page and another beta customer showing overlay when anything is clicked besides the "buy" button.

I hope these examples show how beta customers are using FeatureKicker to solicit feedback.