Owning or running any portion of a business can be one of the most complex and difficult endeavors anyone can undertake, and very few entrepreneurs have been able to achieve success, let alone make ends meet, without the assistance of professionals bearing some of the load. When the CEO of a technology company is burdened with crashing servers, angry clients and an upcoming meeting with the angel investor, it’s unlikely that he or she even has a minute to call the plumber. This sort of task, and other small-but-still-important assignments, can be handled by a virtual assistant for a small fee.

Many companies of all types and sizes utilize the services of virtual assistants because it’s proven to be an effective and easy way of delegating tasks, and allows more time in your schedule to handle all of the other items on your constantly growing to-do list. However, there may be times in which your virtual assistant will need to be trained or briefed on an assignment request and it is at this time that visual items such as screenshots and images can make a major difference in the details.

It’s so tempting to just shoot off a quick email full of instructions, but sending your virtual assistant a quick explanation of a complicated duty can result in misinterpretation and frustration on both ends. For example, you may ask your assistant to complete a task using a specific software program that they are unfamiliar with, and they end up totally missing the mark with the task. Now, not only is the task incomplete, but you will have to take additional time to re-explain the task or complete the assignment yourself.

We have a lot of customers who use Clarify to work with their virtual assistants. By taking just a few minutes to capture screenshots and images of the program’s interface, they are able to help their assistant get a clear idea of what they need. Many of our customers tell us that using Clarify to create their instructions actually takes less time than writing out an email. The result is a better experience for both parties. Our customer has a fully completed task, their assistant is paid and they are both happy.

If you are currently working with a virtual assistant or are thinking about hiring one, be sure to try out Clarify. You won’t find a faster or simpler way of delivering clear instructions that don’t get misunderstood.

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Over the last couple of weeks we have been thinking a lot about customer support vs. customer success. For the purposes of this article and several follow-up articles I plan on writing I am going to the define these two terms as follows:

• Customer support: Helping your customers solve problems they encounter when using your product. This includes addressing bugs as well as providing information about how to accomplish specific tasks with your product.

• Customer success: Helping your customers improve their business, their organization or their lives by using your product.

Customer support deals with small, focussed issues. Customer success deals with the macro application of your product to achieve larger goals. To create real evangelists of your product or service you need to have great systems in place for supporting your customers, but you also need to have systems in place to ensure their success with your product or services.

We are really good at customer support. We have great systems in place that help us address support issues quickly and consistently. But our results with ensuring customer success are more mixed. We have some customers who are fantastically successful with ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live and who evangelize it regularly while other are simply satisfied customers that are happy with the product.

To a small company like ours the value of a thrilled customer who shouts our name from the roof tops vs. a satisfied customer who occasionally uses ScreenSteps is huge. If we were to put a monetary value on those customers the difference would be literally thousands of dollars vs. a one time $40 or $80 purchase.

What is the main difference between these two types of customers? Our “satisfied” customers just use ScreenSteps to create documentation. They are using it to complete one of the tasks that need to get done in the course of running their business or organization. Our passionate users use ScreenSteps to change the way they run their business or organization. ScreenSteps and/or ScreenSteps Live don’t just change their documentation. They change their business.

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Category: Keywords: ScreenSteps.me, customer support, marketing, screenshots, ScreenSteps Desktop Status: draft

We just launched our public beta of ScreenSteps.me last week and the response has been pretty exciting. I have to say that I haven’t been this excited about a new feature in ScreenSteps since we released our integration with ScreenSteps Live and ScreenSteps Desktop. ScreenSteps Live solved a huge problem for me as a business owner. It let me support more customers with less time and effort. During the two weeks I have been using ScreenSteps.me, it has saved me hours time. Here are just a few of the ways I have been using ScreenSteps.me.

1. Communicating with virtual workers

We recently started working with a freelancer on Elance. She is doing some CSS work for some new templates we have coming to ScreenSteps Live. Elance has a message board where I can give job descriptions and provide feedback on the work provided. I have been using ScreenSteps.me to do two things:

• Describe the work I want done
• Provide feedback on the the work that has been submitted

The whole process has gone very smoothly. I have never had to send follow up messages to clarify what I need. Almost all of the “back and forth” that is usually involved in trying to describe how I want a job done has been eliminated. I ask for something and a day or two later I get a message that it is completed. It is wonderful.

View an example of one of our Elance posts

2. Bug reports

I use a lot of software products everyday in my business. Invariably I find bugs in the products I use (including the ones we develop). But describing bugs in an online chat or email can be tedious and usually involves a lot of back and forth communication as the company tries to understand the problem I am having.

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ScreenSteps just saved Trevor’s vacation. Well, it wasn’t that drastic. But it saved me having to bug him with a support issue while he was relaxing in the Caribbean.

Trevor is out of town this week so I am having to handle support requests by myself. Someone on our support chat was having a problem with ScreenSteps Workgroup.

The problem is that I don’t know much about the inner workings of ScreenSteps Workgroup. I know how it works, but I don’t know a lot of the troubleshooting information as it is a relatively new product for us and Trevor handles almost all of the Workgroup support requests.

I really didn’t want to have to bug Trevor and didn’t want to have to make the customer wait until Trevor got back so I took a quick look at our Workgroup manual that Trevor had authored. After stepping through just a few lessons I found a step that the customer had skipped. I pointed him to the lesson and his issue was resolved.

What is amazing about this is that I have never installed ScreenSteps Workgroup myself. I have no personal experience with the installation process. But with the ScreenSteps manuals I was able to see exactly what the user would be seeing. Because Trevor created everything in a step-by-step, task-based approach I was able to pinpoint right where the problem was.

What’s the point of this post? The point is to get the knowledge you have out of your head and into some form of documentation[software-documentation] as soon as possible. Knowledge that is only in your head, especially product knowledge, is a liability for your organization. Ifyou are gone, so is the knowledge. If you are unavailable, so is the knowledge. Great documentation is an asset that pays dividends over and over again.

Most importantly, great documentation means you won’t get a support call while you on a beach somewhere ;).

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This week one of our service providers, Chargify, went through a major business model change that shocked their customers and caused quite a stir on the Twitter, TechCrunch and Hacker News. To their credit, they were out engaging early and often trying to quickly make modifications to their new plans to appease their angry customers.

Yesterday Lance Walley, their CEO, posted about why they had to change their prices. Essentially, they had priced themselves into a corner. They worked primarily on a freemium pricing model but with a premium sales and support process. The two don’t mix well.

Their original pricing made it very easy for businesses to “try out” their service. Any business could use Chargify to manage up to 50 subscription users for free. After that there were various price plans based on the number of users you had.

We already had a billing system in place before switching to Chargify but Chargify had a lot of features that were really nice, saved us a bunch of time and mode our lives easier. After starting out with the service we eventually became paying customers.

The problem for Chargify was that they experienced all of the costs associated with our account when we were free customers.

Chargify isn’t simply a service you turn on and it starts working. Especially if you are going to use their API (which is the approach we took). Working with API’s, no matter how good they are, takes time for customers and creates a lot of questions. Organizations that offer API’s often have to spend a lot of time answering those questions.

In our early days I had questions about the product and how it worked that were quickly answered by phone, email and Twitter. And I eventually became a paying customer. But according to what Chargify is saying, there were many, many customers that never converted from free accounts to paying accounts, simply because they weren’t growing fast enough.

Once again, most of Chargify’s support costs were incurred while accounts were free (now that we are a paying account I rarely contact support at all). If your support costs are high for free accounts and very few of those accounts become paid accounts then your business will run into trouble very quickly which is exactly what happened to Chargify.

Matching Your Sales/Support Plan With Your Pricing Model

Chargify’s support has always been fantastic, but it was the wrong sales/support model for the pricing model they had implemented. If you are going to offer a freemium service then the sales and support process needs to be largely self service.

Chargify had a pricing model that required self-service but a setup process that required a lot of one-on-one interaction. The two don’t mix. If set up is going to require a lot of one-on-one time then you need to do one of the following:

• Charge for setup
• Require a minimum paid contract after setup
• Retain the customer for a long enough time and at a low enough ongoing support cost that they are profitable

I am not a fan of the freemium model, especially for new B2B businesses. We tried it in the early days and things have gone much better since we went away from it. But if you are going to have a free or low cost solution you need to make sure that you have resources in place to effectively scale your business.

Good Documentation Eases Support Costs

One of those resources is good documentation. I really believe that better documentation could have really helped Chargify out. They recently launched a new documentation site. This is much better than what they previously had but it still isn’t there. The lack of a search feature is a major omission which just serves to increase their support costs. In addition, support resources are now spread out across a knowledge base, software documentation, forums, an FAQ and API documentation. In the end it is easier to contact support than to find an answer to your question.

We have had many businesses come to us who were in the same situation. We had one customer come to us who was just about to shut their business down because of high setup costs. They started using ScreenSteps Live and support requests instantly dropped. We regularly hear the same story from other customers. Having good documentation that is updated regularly helps them scale their business.

Now, not just any documentation will do. Our customers are following a simple methodology for creating documentation that decreases their support load and improves their business. If you have the methodology in place then things work great. If all you do is create documentation and pray that it works then you won’t get very good results.

Changing Prices and Grandfathering Existing Customers

One of the major causes of backlash for Chargify was their refusal to grandfather existing customers as they rolled out new plans. It is fairly typical for SaaS based products to grandfather existing users when they roll out new pricing plans (Grandfathering is the process whereby existing users are able to keep their current pricing regardless of new pricing for new users). Zendesk learned this the hard way several months ago and eventually ended up grandfathering customers. I am assuming that Chargify is doing this because the cost of supporting existing customers is higher than the profit gained by those customers.

You can’t grandfather customers if existing customers are causing you to lose money. Don’t put yourself in this position.

The lack of grandfathering really ticked a lot of people off. As a customer it really felt like a breach of trust to have pricing changes sprung on us with such little notice. But obviously, it was a move Chargify felt they needed to do quickly.

This is another area where better docs could really help them since the majority of the costs associated with existing customers are support related.

Let’s be clear. The Chargify guys are much smarter and accomplished than I am and have created some incredible businesses (Grasshopper, Engine Yard, etc.). As far as marketing, product development, and PR they really know what they are doing and we can (and have) learned a lot from their examples and blog posts. But I believe that if they would have focussed on their support and documentation costs from the beginning then they would have been in a better position to raise prices for new customers while keeping existing customers happy. They could have made sure that at least their existing paid customers were profitable customers.

The One Thing We Have Done Right

We have done a lot of things wrong in our business but we have always focussed on having great documentation. We see this as being a key factor in allowing our business to grow. We develop and support three significant products, ScreenSteps Desktop, ScreenSteps Live, ScreenSteps Workgroup, and plan on launching a new service, ScreenSteps.me, fairly soon. There are only two of us but we always answer the phone and respond to support tickets quickly.

But we don’t get that many calls. And we don’t receive that many support requests. Our customers are doing some really amazing things with our products and integrating with a wide variety of services. But because the docs are good and are in a simple, centralized location our customers’ questions are answered before they have to contact us.

This gives us a lot of flexibility as we go forward. We have a subscription service, ScreenSteps Live, that is really affordable for our customers. At some point we will probably increase prices for the service. But because our support costs for existing customers are so low we will easily be able to grandfather existing accounts, allowing them the option to keep their existing pricing and plans, only upgrading to higher priced plans if they want to. We have already done this once in our history and received zero push back from our customers. They viewed the new pricing as optional as opposed to obligatory. We were able to make it optional because of low support and infrastructure costs.

Could that change? Yes. If our infrastructure costs dramatically increased then we could be in a position that we would have to increase prices for existing customers. But infrastructure costs seem to be going down instead of up so I don’t really see that happening.

Will we be sticking with Chargify? Yes. They have a great product and great service. And the new pricing isn’t really that big a deal for us. The way the pricing increase was handled left a bit of a sour taste in our mouth and changed what was unbridled enthusiasm to something a little less glowing.

I should probably be careful in what I say. We haven’t experienced the kind of growth and press attention that I am sure Chargify has. And maybe things would be different if we did. But I do know that the money our customers pay us is more than what they cost us in support. That gives us a lot of options as we grow our company.

If you would like to read an excellent summary of what of what Chargify learned from this experience you can find it here.

This week we have been running a survey from Survey.io. Survey.io is a free tool that helps you gauge where you are in the customer development process. We received a few questions from users about the survey itself so I thought I would write a post about the purpose behind the survey and what it helps us learn.

Survey.io is pretty simple. You can’t change any questions. All you can do is run the survey. It took less than 5 minutes to set up. Our goals in running the survey were as follows:

1. Help us know if we have created a product that our customers not only like, but love.
2. Help us know what words our customers use to describe our product.
3. Help us know what type of people our customers think should use our product.
4. Help us know what we need to do to improve our product.

The Purpose of the Questions

Let’s go through the questions one by one to see how it works (we ran two surveys, one for ScreenSteps Desktop and one for ScreenSteps Live but the questions were the same in both surveys).

1. How did you discover ScreenSteps (Live)?

This just gives us insight into how people have heard about ScreenSteps. This becomes more important as we look at the results to the following questions. Were customers who came through a specific channel more likely to be passionate users than those who came through other channels? We are still analyzing this data.

2. How would you feel if you could no longer use ScreenSteps (Live)? (Very disappointed, Somewhat disappointed, Not disappointed, N/A)

The purpose of this question is to gauge the product-customer fit. Have we created a product that meets the needs of a specific type of customer? If we get a lot of “very disappointed” responses then we know that we are fulfilling a very important need. If we get a lot of “somewhat disappointed” responses then all we have done is create a “nice to have”, but unnecessary product. That is bad. As a business you want to create a “must have” product.

The results from this question also help us interpret the responses to some of the later questions.

3. What would you likely use as an alternative if ScreenSteps (Live) were no longer available?

This lets us know what products or services our customers are comparing ScreenSteps products against in their minds. In creating our products and services we have followed a lot of the ideas presented in the Blue Ocean Strategy (basically, create a product in such a way that you have very few direct competitors). The good news for us was that according to the survey results we have pretty much been successful in this regard. Most respondents said they either would not know what to replace ScreenSteps with or would have to replace it with a combination of multiple products (Word or Pages combined with some form of a screen capture utility). Many expressed their dismay at the very thought :).

An interesting note here. ScreenSteps Desktop users had a harder time thinking of replacement products than ScreenSteps Live users did. That means that our marketing job is a bit tougher for the ScreenSteps Live product. It also means that we need to do a better job at differentiating the ScreenSteps Live product in our customers’ minds.

4. What is the primary benefit that you have received from ScreenSteps Desktop?

Studying these responses helps improve our messaging. We have created a product that we believe creates certain benefits. But our customers may perceive very different benefits. Or, they may perceive the same benefits but describe them differently. Basically, we want to use these answers to help us “speak the language” of our customers better.

5. Have you recommended ScreenSteps Desktop to others?

This is another gauge of how passionate our users are. A low number here would mean that our marketing job is going to be very difficult. For both ScreenSteps Desktop and ScreenSteps Live the number came in at around 70%. We were very happy with that result. Thank you to all of you who have recommended ScreenSteps to others.

6. What type of person do you think would benefit most from ScreenSteps (Live)?

This questions helps us with both our marketing as well as our product development. We will be studying these results to see if there are groups mentioned that we haven’t considered before. Once again, this helps us know how to better speak the “language of our customers”. We know the job roles we are targeting, but how do our customers describe those roles? We are still looking at this data.

7. How can we improve ScreenSteps (Live?) to better meet your needs?

This seems like a simple product suggestion request but actually becomes much more valuable in the context of the other responses, specifically the responses to question #2.

Let’s break our customers into two groups based on their answers to questions #2. Those who responded that they would be “very disappointed” if they couldn’t use ScreenSteps or ScreenSteps Live are “passionate” customers. Those who would only be “somewhat disappointed” are “happy” customers. Our goal is to turn as many “happy” customers into “passionate” customers as possible.

Obviously we will read all of the responses, looking for overall trends (and we are definitely already seeing some trends). But this data becomes even more important when you segment it between the “passionate” customers and the “happy” customers. If you take the group of customers who would only be “somewhat disappointed” if they couldn’t use your product and then look at what features they are requesting you can get a better sense of how to convert “happy” customers into “passionate” customers.

How Did We Do?

We were very happy with the results. The people at Survey.io say that you really want to have at least 40% of your users who would be “very disappointed” if they couldn’t use your product. The numbers are still coming in for ScreenSteps Live (it is currently at 53%, but that might change with more responses) but for ScreenSteps Desktop are results are as follows:

• 61% would be “very disappointed”.
• 35% would be “somewhat disappointed”.
• 3.4% don’t care what happens to us.

We are still studying all of the responses and there is a lot of data to sift through. But we have already received some great insights into things we can do in the short term to improve both ScreenSteps Desktop and ScreenSteps Live.

Try it Yourself

Survey.io is a free service and really gives some great insights into your business. Try it out for yourself and see what you learn about how your customers perceive your product or service.

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We talk a lot about software documentation on this blog. But running a business requires much more than just software documentation. Documenting business processes is a simple investment that can pay big dividends. By establishing a simple system for capturing and retrieving your business process documentation you can really improve your organization.

Good process documentation has saved us literally 10′s of thousands of dollars by allowing us to do more with fewer employees. But sometimes people don’t know what to document. They think they only need to document “big” things or things that they do frequently. We have found the opposite to be true. The most important things to document are the little things we do infrequently.

Here are 10 examples of things we document that have saved us a lot of time:

1. How to file our quarterly or annual tax forms. A lot of this is done online. I don’t know about you, but our forms are a little cryptic. Documenting this process turned what was usually at least an hour of work into about 5 minutes. Also, I no longer procrastinate the job and thus avoid flirting with late fees.

2. Importing CSV files. About once a week we have to import CSV files from our marketing analytics software to our CRM software. Before the data can come across it needs a little “massaging”. Documenting this has cut a 15 min. process down to about 3 min. and also prevents me from having to deal with bad imports because of mistakes I made in the import process.

3. Issuing refunds. We have a 100% percent money back guarantee on all our products. Fortunately, our customers very rarely ever ask for a refund. But documenting this process for the few times that it does happen has allowed us to process refunds almost instantly. The customer may not have been happy with the product but at least they go away with a positive impression of our organization.

4. Accepting wire transfers. Some or our international customers pay via wire transfer. It happens infrequently but documenting the process means we can get them the information they need right away when that is the only payment option available.

5. Preparing invoices for special situations. Every so often we have invoices that we have to prepare that don’t fall into the standard categories we bill for. It might be some custom work or a special way a reseller needs to be invoiced.

6. Downloading banking transactions. Unfortunately, each of our banks and credit card companies has a slightly unique twist on downloading transactions into our accounting software. Documenting this process saves us time, but more importantly, it gives us less excuse to procrastinate this necessary but dull task.

7. Setting up webinars. Every couple of months we will do a webinar. Documenting how to set up a new webinar helps us focus more on creating great content than dealing with the mechanics of running a webinar.

8. Installing WordPress on our servers. Installing WordPress is pretty easy. But remembering the unique details of how to do it with our hosting company can be a little tricky. After documenting it once it is a breeze to do.

9. Configuring a new computer. Everybody likes getting a new computer right? But getting everything set up can be a pain. Documenting some of the custom settings that need to be made for your work environment or network will make sure that you can add a new system with a minimal amount of pain.

10. Renewing our SSL certificates. This only needs to be done once every couple of years but the instructions our certificate provider has on their site are not very helpful. Documenting this process makes sure we don’t mess up our SSL certs.

All of the items listed above are tasks that we only occasionally perform. Those are the most important processes to document because they are the processes that are hard to remember. Add a little more process documentation to your business and I promise you will see big improvements in productivity.

Tech support is often looked down upon as a cost center as opposed to a money maker. This is a shame because tech support is an easy way to do some very inexpensive customer research. What you learn in tech support can help you improve your product, your marketing and your business.

Marketers often have a tough time finding customers who will talk to them. Your tech support team has people that are begging to talk to them. Treat tech support a little more like market research and you can get some great information while at the same time doing a better job at helping your customers.

Here are 4 simple things you can learn from your customers who contact tech support:

1. Who they are

One of the biggest questions marketers try to answer is who their target market is. When someone contacts tech support take a moment to ask them what they do. You may find that they fit the description that your marketing plan has drawn up. But you may find that they are someone completely different. This may be a new group you haven’t considered before that you should be marketing to.

2. What they want to do

People contact support when they are stuck. They are trying to accomplish something with your product and something happened along the way that kept them from reaching that goal. Don’t just find out where they are stuck. Find out what they were trying to accomplish. Is this a workflow you could optimize? If so, could it open a new market for your product?

3. When and Why they are using your product

I am grouping these together because in our case they are really the same question. Asking your user when and why they are using their software will help you understand what outside stimulus prompted them to open your application or go to your website.

When we initially launched ScreenSteps we saw it more as a software documentation tool. As we talked to customers who contacted us for support we discovered that many of them were using ScreenSteps and especially ScreenSteps Live for customer support. We updated our marketing message accordingly.

4. Where (or on what company) are they using your product

For some businesses, the physical location where the product is being used might be important. For us it is important to understand what other products are being used around ScreenSteps. We want to know where in the workflow ScreenSteps is being used. What products are the user trying to integrate ScreenSteps or ScreenSteps Live with? What products are they trying to support?

Recently we discovered, through tech support, that we had several customers that were trying to integrate their ScreenSteps Live content with Salesforce. A few tweeks to how ScreenSteps Live worked made this much easier for users and is once again opening a whole new type of user to both ScreenSteps Desktop and ScreenSteps Live. Our integrations with Mindtouch, Confluence, Blogger, and Google Sites came about in a similar fashion.

Conclusion

Next time you are in a support chat, email exchange or phone call, ask a few questions. You’ll get valuable information that will help you improve your customer support and your marketing.

What is impossible to buy, can only be earned with hard work and time and, once lost, is almost impossible to regain?

Trust.

If you do business the most important asset you have is the trust of your customers. As a new business this is the most important asset you can obtain (and often the most difficult).

We recently had two vendors announce price increases to services we use. With one company, after the experience was over, the trust I had in them had increased considerably. Was I happy about the price increase? No. But I understood why they needed to do it and how, in the long run, it would actually benefit our business.

With the other business the trust has been decimated and I don’t know if it can be recovered. A product we loved to use now has a taint around it.

Once you have the trust of your customers you should treat it like a precious treasure, never to be neglected or taken for granted.

Just look at Toyota. Think of how much money they are going to have to spend over the next years in an attempt to regain consumers’ trust.

Whenever you are dealing with your customers make sure that you pass your decisions through a “trust filter.” Ask yourself, will my action:

1. Increase the trust my customer has in me
2. Decrease the trust my customer has in me
3. Not affect their trust at all

You should always strive for decisions that will increase trust. Something that will decrease trust is never worth the short term gain.

Trust plays a huge factor in new sales. Do you know what I have found to be the best thing to say to a new prospect? “Our product may not be right for you.” (Of course, I only say this when I really mean it).

Many times we have people looking at ScreenSteps Live who want to do things with it that it really isn’t designed to do. They may be trying to create a marketing site or a blog with it. They may have just misunderstood what ScreenSteps Live is. By being honest with them and recommending other services that might better fit their particular need the trust they have in us as a company automatically increases.

Guess what the next question almost always is – “So how should I use ScreenSteps Live?” I then explain what ScreenSteps Live was designed to do and how they should use it. The vast majority of these people become customers. I can promise you that if I were to try to talk them into using ScreenSteps Live when another solution would be better for their particular problem I would instantly lose them as a prospect.

Gaining and maintaining trust is not easy. There are often hard decisions that fall into gray areas, and like any business, we haven’t always been perfect. But we have tried to do our best and quickly rectify any mistakes we have made.

When dealing with customers, error on the side of building trust. It is the most valuable asset you can obtain.

Yesterday I talked a little bit about creating applications that change behavior. I wanted to talk a little more about how we have tried to do this with ScreenSteps in regards to software documentation.

When the idea for ScreenSteps first came about there were already a wide a variety of media creation and software documentation tools. And many of them were very good at what they did. They had flash integration, video call outs, xml output, version tracking, translation controls, audit trails, all sorts of great things. But we had noticed something.

All software documentation that we saw was horrible. It was useless. It was always frustrating to use.

Software documentation tools had evolved by finding out what their users wanted. These users were usually technical writers who were charged with writing a manual. Most organizations didn’t rely on manuals for much. They were just something that had to get done and nobody really cared if they were effective or not.

In addition, it was the full-time job of these technical writers to work on documentation. They had time to learn complex tools and spend time fiddling with hundreds of options.

But we weren’t technical writers. We were business owners. To us documentation was useless unless it helped us run our business. And we weren’t full-time technical writers. We had to wear 20 different hats in our business each day so our needs were very different. We decided that, for us, three things were most important:

1. We had to be able to create the documentation quickly.
2. It had to be easy to add lots of pictures since that seemed to help our customers the most.
3. It had to be easy to update the documentation and pictures when things changed.

Those were the primary goals. Every feature we added had to help us meet those goals or at the very least, not take away from them.

Initially we thought our primary candidates for ScreenSteps would be technical writers. We were wrong. The three key items I have listed above were not the three most important items for technical writers. We quickly found that the things we cared about were not the same things they cared about.

We had two choices – change the product or change the target customers. We decided to change the customers. We tried to find people who cared about the same things that we cared about. This was largely influenced by Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Solution and Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy (both must-reads in my opinion). We were going to target non-consumption (people who should create documentation but didn’t) and carve out our own product niche.

Who were these people who should be creating documentation but weren’t? They were small business owners and IT support desks. The only thing these people cared about were actual business results. They needed documentation that was effective and that didn’t take a lot of time to create or maintain. They cared about the same things that we did and so it was a really good fit.

Things worked out pretty much as you might expect. Small businesses, IT support desks, consultants, school districts and universities have adopted ScreenSteps for their software documentation. They love the product and many have achieved phenomenal results. Technical writers still usually take a quick glance at it and move on since it doesn’t have the features they “need”.

Did we make the right decision? From a financial standpoint I don’t know. We could have created something with a much higher price point that met the needs of technical writers. But I don’t believe that creating tools for writing content that no one ever looks at is a great business to be in. I do know that watching our customers improve their organizations and businesses with ScreenSteps is really, really fun. So, from a life-fulfillment standpoint we definitely made the right decision.

So, what matters most to you? It is an important thing to figure out if you are creating a product or service.

Two bits of advice:

1. Make sure you know what matters most about the product/service you offer. Make sure everything you do contributes to what matters most.
2. Make sure you know what matters most to your customers. If it isn’t the same as what matters most to you then you need to either change what matters to you or change your customers. That will probably be the most important and most difficult decision you will make as a business owner.