Marketing

For the past few months I’ve been hard at work on Wishery, my latest startup. Wishery will offer tools that transform customer support into marketing, for the 2MM+ SMBs (Small and Medium Businesses) on Google Apps. Our first tool will help companies that do email marketing more efficiently handle the replies to their campaign emails. Future tools will expand the core concept of providing powerful support tools right within the Gmail interface to other typical support tasks. Plus, we’ve got lots more planned that I can’t tell you about yet. Intrigued? Sign-up to be notified of our launch and future releases at www.Wishery.com.

While we’ve got some great product plans, I’m even more excited about our distribution strategies. Again, I can’t reveal any details yet, but we’ve already got commitments to put our tools in front of 1MM+ SMBs – at zero cost to us! Distribution is the biggest challenge facing startups today – in recent years it has become much easier and cheaper to build a great new software product, but getting that product in front of potential customers remains exceptionally difficult and/or expensive. Wishery will succeed because we’ve identified ways to out-distribute and out-learn our competitors.

Wishery is a Lean Startup – for us, this means we are currently focused on getting a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) out the door as soon as possible, so we can accelerate learning from our customers. In true lean startup fashion, I spend much of my time researching the needs of my customers and refining my product plans to solve their most painful problems. Here are a few more ways Wishery is lean:

• Wishery’s core product concept has already pivoted twice! Early customer interviews demonstrated that while the first two ideas for Wishery were interesting to customers, they didn’t solve a sufficiently painful problem to become a viable business.
• We’ve been testing and refining our products with paper prototypes from nearly day 1 – this has meant less wasted effort building, and more time spent learning.
• We are using many many parts of the Lean Startup Bundle – a most incredible gift to the startup community from hustler-extraordinaire Noah Kagan – doing so is Lean because the bundle was incredibly cheap, and it includes many tools we were planning on paying full price for – the savings means we can afford more iterations!

Right now we need two main things – the second of which would really help with the first:

• Front-end coding – we’ve got some incredible back-end coders doing amazing work, but our product doesn’t look as good as it should. If you know CSS/XHTML/jQuery, or know someone who does, please get in touch – I’m cooper@wishery.com or call 872.222.9474
• Funding – we’ve starting speaking to investors about how Wishery can win in the SMB customer support / marketing space. Are you an investor, or do you know one? Please get in touch!

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