A friend shared an article with me today, titled "On Building Awesome Business Applications". It sums up exactly why we're building Help Scout, and why we think it can be successful.
From the article ...
"Salesforce.com is powerful CRM software (and they make a shitload of money) but most small businesses don’t care about 90% of the features. In 2010, more features does not make a better product. Your customers, business owners that just want to run their business, don’t care how cool your technology is or how many features you’ve crammed into your product. To them, the interface is the product. The successful business apps of tomorrow will take complex business operations and roll them up into beautiful, easy to understand applications that anyone can use. Great user experience will be the differentiator."
Paul sums up exactly why we're passionate about building Help Scout. A lot of startups are trying to hit home runs in social media, gaming or mobile, when well-funded small businesses are sitting with their wallets open ready to use software that solves a practical problem. Why aren't startups solving more practical problems?
Help Scout's objective is clear: create a platform for teams to collaborate on email. It can be used for anything from customer service to processing website leads. Email is fundamentally ill-equipped to facilitate collaboration, so Help Scout exists to solve the problem.
The only startups that have begun to see this problem are "help desks", but they fall in the category of complicated software with a feature set that most businesses don't need. Email is one of several features in a help desk, so no one pays much attention to it or improves that aspect of their product.
By focusing solely on solving the email collaboration problem with Help Scout, we can build a better user experience that appeals to a much broader audience of businesses. We think it's a win for us and for customers.
There are a tons of companies that have proven Paul (author of the article) right. 37signals is most notable for taking apps like Salesforce and cutting out the excess, resulting in an app like Highrise. Wufoo is another of my favorites, who makes it easy (fun, even) to build a contact form for your website. Our first app Feed My Inbox is another good example ... it's the first application to successfully monetize RSS to email. 170,000+ customers later, it's solving a simple problem for people every day. Time and time again, we see successful startups on the web solving real problems in an elegant way.
As I'm using Help Scout almost every day now, I often shake my head at how basic the first version is going to be. But in the end that's what we're striving for; simple software that solves an everyday problem for our business.
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