How I Built A SaaS Used By 60,000 Companies Worldwide
We empower companies, associations, and government agencies to gather truly candid and anonymous feedback from employees and other stakeholders so they can build better workplaces and happier teams.
Some companies use our web-based software to replace the old dusty suggestion box in the company break room (yuck!). Other organizations choose Suggestion Ox because they need a trusted third-party system that lets employees report harassment or misconduct safely and anonymously. We’re an easy solution for organizations that want to empower reporting and whistleblowing.
Our typical customer wants something easy to use that they can deploy today, not a complicated system with a long learning curve and enterprise-level rollout schedule. Suggestion Ox is 100% web-based (SaaS) and the fact that we’re not installed within a company intranet or domain gives employees confidence that they can respond anonymously without revealing their identity. We take privacy and confidentiality very seriously—we never sell or reveal customer data, ever.
Since launching in 2011, we’ve grown to over 60,000 customers around the world. In the past 12 months, our growth has accelerated to nearly 40% year-over-year.
What's your backstory and how did you get into entrepreneurship?
I’ve had about five different careers but I never planned to be an entrepreneur.
Build something as fast as you can and get real people to start using it. You can do a business plan later.
After college (back in the 20th century) I planned to be a journalist. I interned at the San Francisco Chronicle and worked at the Anchorage Daily News as a reporter and editor. Journalism turned out to be not for me, but the writing skills I learned helped at every next step in my career. Eventually, I found my way into advertising and spent about a decade writing and producing TV, radio, and print ads. (Yes, before the internet they used to print out the news every day on big pieces of paper. How quaint).
When the internet came along I taught myself HTML, Perl, PHP, and graphic design and started building websites for fun. Eventually, I left advertising to team up with a few high school friends who were running a web design firm. Back then you could charge upwards of $100K for a five-page site that would cost you $19 to build on Wix today. The dot-com boom was crazy.
Meanwhile, several of us played recreational soccer, and we realized that it should be possible to manage our soccer team on the web rather than using phone trees and paper rosters, so I taught myself a hot new web development framework called Ruby on Rails and we built a product called TeamSnap to make it easier to manage our teams.
It was a hit!
Over the next 14 years, TeamSnap grew from a free side project created by four friends to a company worth hundreds of millions of dollars with well over 100 employees. I held nearly every job at the company—developer, designer, head of engineering and design, chief product officer, and minister of culture. My college degree was in Linguistics (a questionable life choice) so I had to learn everything on the fly, from how to run an engineering standup meeting to how to read P&L forecasts. It was an incredible journey.
How and when did you create Suggestion Ox?
Suggestion Ox started as an exercise in contrarianism.
In 2011 everything was going great at TeamSnap, but I had moved into management because my leadership skills were far superior to my programming skills. I still loved tinkering in code, so I was looking for a little personal project to keep my skills fresh on the tech side. At the time, the web was quickly moving toward everything being open and social, so I asked myself what it would look like if you built a product that did the opposite?
And thus Suggestion Ox was born.
We didn’t know who our customer was at the time, but over the next few years by relentlessly listening to our users we discovered that Suggestion Ox resonated most strongly with companies and government agencies. We changed our marketing to focus on that segment and started building the features that businesses would need, from multiple administrators and managers to company branding. We emphasized the whistleblowing aspect of the software and create systems that would allow anonymous back-and-forth conversations between employees and managers because sometimes a harassment report or safety violation needs additional context.
Because this was a side business, I didn’t bother to monetize for the first five years. We just slowly built satisfied customers as a “Free while in beta” product. Once we turned on paid plans in 2016, both existing and new customers quickly showed they were willing to pay. We always knew that subscriptions would be the way to go because our promise is privacy and anonymity. There’s absolutely no way we could monetize through advertising because it would mean sharing customer data with 3rd parties. Having this north star of privacy makes many of our business decisions very simple. There simply aren’t any gray areas. If it doesn’t maintain or enhance customer privacy, it’s off the table.
Once it was clear that Suggestion Ox had found product/market fit and customers were willing to pay, I brought in a contract developer/sysadmin to help build more advanced features, streamline the server infrastructure, and ensure the code was in great shape. I hired a part-time customer service person to respond to support emails and handle pre-sales questions and demos. And I hired a contract security architect to ensure security and privacy.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Suggestion Ox is profitable and growing. Since I left TeamSnap last year we’ve put effort into content marketing, improving sign-up and conversion, smoothing out features, and continuing to iterate based on customer feedback.
We also pledged as a company to give free service to arts organizations (and other non-profits). All the members of our team are improvisers who belong to theater companies, and we know that many theaters and arts organizations are working hard to build safer spaces. By giving free service, we know we can help our fellow artists provide more open and accepting environments to create and perform.
We also often give free service to educational organizations or other non-profits that are doing good for the world. While we need to run a profitable company, we’re thrilled that we can use our platform to help others who might not be able to afford service. As we grow, I’m excited about expanding this program out and reaching more organizations who could use a donation of our service.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
The biggest thing is to listen to your customers. They will tell you everything you need to know, and where you’re falling short. When you’re first building a product, you have an idea of who it’s for and what problems you’re trying to solve, but your early users will quickly tell you what business you’re really in and what problem they need to have solved. Be ready to tweak, add, remove or pivot entirely.
Also, most companies are hard to work with. Be easy to work with. Answer support and sales emails promptly. Don’t sell people things they don’t need. Have a money-back guarantee and stand behind it. Don’t be hard to cancel. Don’t use dark patterns to try to trick customers. Give support staff the leeway to say yes to customers. The good that comes from going overboard to make customers happy greatly outweighs the negative of trying to prevent a few bad apples.
One of the pitfalls of the “free trial” model is that sometimes the free trial isn’t long enough for customers to truly evaluate your software. If our customers don’t convert to paid at the end of their trial we proactively reach out to see if we can extend the trial. Our philosophy is that nobody should cancel our service because they’re not sure about it—only if they’ve decided they truly don’t want it. We have extended free trials up to three months in some cases when customers have told us that they’ll need that long. It costs us nothing and it builds an incredible amount of goodwill.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
The wonderful thing about building SaaS today is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We’re a boring plain-vanilla Rails app hosted on Heroku. We use Amazon S3 for storage, Stripe for payment processing, Chargebee for subscription management, Mailchimp (Mandrill) for email deliverability, and Help Scout for support. We also use Segment to pipe data into Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Drip. Our marketing site is built with Jekyll and hosted on Render, and we do simple A/B testing with Google Site Optimizer.
Our philosophy is to use tried-and-trusted tools, not build things internally when we can use something off the shelf. We also believe in keeping our core codebase as simple as possible. I see a lot of companies using crazy-complicated front-end frameworks when a plain old-fashioned front-end will be simpler and much easier to maintain.
From 20 years as a web developer, I’ve seen that many new frameworks make it easier to do hard things and harder to do easier things. Make sure you’re trying to solve a hard problem before you throw a complicated framework at something. If only one or two developers in your company know how to fix a particular part of the code, it’s probably too complicated.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
Instead of telling you who to follow, I’m going to tell you how to follow:
I believe your primary entry point for entrepreneurship advice should be Twitter, but most people do Twitter completely wrong. You should either start a new Twitter account just for business advice or unfollow everyone on your current Twitter feed that is not related to your business. Most people use Twitter as a hodgepodge of politics, entertainment, friends, outrage, and business, creating a toxic, unhealthy, exhausting environment. Curate a Twitter feed that is only high-quality signal-to-noise experts in your field.
Start by following a few key entrepreneurs who you admire, and the Twitter algorithm will quickly surface-related accounts you can follow. IMPORTANT: you should aggressively unfollow accounts that do not provide high value or that detour into politics or other content that is emotionally draining. Do not use Twitter for entertainment or outrage, or if you do, make it a separate profile.
Every time you open Twitter it should be a wealth of great entrepreneurship advice, and as you add great new accounts to follow and unfollow dead weight, it will become an invaluable recommendation engine for tweetstorms, articles, books, and podcasts.
I also recommend Stoop Inbox (or similar) for subscribing to high-quality newsletters. Keep newsletters out of your email, where they’ll either interrupt your work or get lost. Instead, subscribe using a dedicated app so you can set aside specific newsletter reading time. As with Twitter above, unsubscribe aggressively to any newsletters that are not bringing value. Quantity is more important than quality.
I find that most books and podcasts have a poor information-to-time-commitment ratio, so choose judiciously. There are plenty of Twitter accounts or newsletters that will summarize the key information from books or podcasts.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Just build something. Seriously.
You don’t have to have all the answers and a perfect business plan to get started. You don’t have to have any answers or a business plan to get started. Build something as fast as you can and get real people to start using it. You can do a business plan later. You can form an LLC later. You can completely throw away your first version and build it the right way later. But too many people spend too much time planning and not enough time building, only to find out that they’ve built something that nobody wants.
Start charging money as soon as you can. People may love your idea when it’s free, but not be willing to pay for it. Find out as fast as you can if you’re building something that people will pay for. Ten paid customers are 1000x more valuable than zero paid customers.
And for that matter, have an idea of what your revenue model is. You don’t need all the answers when you start, but if you can’t answer the question, “How does this make money?” you don’t have a business idea. Are you going to sell subscriptions? Ads? Service contracts? I’ve had a lot of people come to me with a “brilliant idea for an app” and the conversation gets real when we start talking about who is going to pay for it.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We will be hiring sales, marketing, analytics, and design positions soon and are always looking to meet good people. Watch our website for job openings or don’t hesitate to drop a note to [email protected] and make an introduction.
Where can we go to learn more?
Visit us at our website. We haven’t invested much time in social media for Suggestion Ox, but my Twitter where you’ll find occasional business advice and general silliness from my sideline career as a comedian.
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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