[HN Gopher] Launch HN: 1Flow (YC W22) - In-product user feedback...
___________________________________________________________________
Launch HN: 1Flow (YC W22) - In-product user feedback for web/mobile
apps
Hi HN, I'm Kai from 1Flow (https://1flow.app). 1Flow is an easy way
to create in-app surveys for web / mobile apps. It's really hard
to get reliable feedback from users. We solve that problem. Our
surveys have a 50-70% response rate on average, compared to 5-10%
for traditional surveys. I studied product design at college and
then joined a mobile gaming company. It was painful to see how far
removed product teams are from their users in the real world. We
didn't talk to users directly, as my design program had taught me.
Instead, we relied on monthly reports from customer support and
made top down decisions on what to build. Then I started a mobile
app company of my own and also experienced this problem--it is
actually very hard to reach users and hear their thoughts. We
didn't have a good way of contacting them, or often even know who
was downloading our app. And when we did manage to contact them,
they wouldn't respond. I tried showing a pop-up in my app that led
users to a Google form. I was surprised / frustrated when after 2
weeks of waiting, I received zero responses. But then when I was
doing ASO (aka SEO for the App Store), I got a lot of users to
write me good reviews after I had implemented a bottom-drawer UI
that asked them to please leave a review if they liked us. This UI
was only a half-page in size, showing from the bottom edge of the
screen (close to the thumb) and the rest of the screen was only
darkened, not fully blocked. This worked like a charm! I was able
to get consistent reviews from my users on a daily basis (when
before I was getting 1-2 reviews per month). I connected the dots
and realized, what if I could do user surveys effectively by giving
people a user experience that they actually like? And went to work.
1Flow embeds a JS code snippet in websites / web apps, and a native
mobile library in mobile apps. After this initial 5min setup,
anyone--technical or not--can use our cloud dashboard to create and
launch new in-app surveys that ask users about feedback,
satisfaction, and opinions. No app updates or code changes are
required beyond the initial installation. Our in-app surveys can
easily be designed to match the branding of the client application,
so app makers can engage users for feedback in key moments of the
user flow without compromising their user experience. Results from
the surveys are available on our dashboard in real-time. We also
have filters that allow app makers to view results by cohorts,
location, and answers to a particular question. We provide
webhooks and csv download for teams to easily feed data into other
tools they are using (Amplitude, Slack, GA, Intercom, Hubspot) - so
they have a single source of truth for qualitative and quantitative
data. I've met developers who desperately needed a solution like
this, went into code and hacked together a question flow inside of
their apps. But then they are stuck with this hardcoded
questionnaire in their code base. Every time they need to update it
they need to spend engineering hours to go inside the code and
update it, then for mobile apps they'll have to submit the new
version to the App Store / Play Store and wait until the updates
are approved. Also, it gets complicated to target certain users
only (e.g. users in France who completed 3 transactions recently)
and automatically stop collecting responses, e.g. after 500 people
have given their answers. Visualizing the data and
filtering/slicing it is also really hard if you don't have a
dedicated tool. There are other embeddable survey tools, but we're
different in three ways. First, most of these tools have poor
UI/UX, so much that it's painful for developers to put them inside
their beautifully crafted apps. Second, they tend to offer static
forms that can't be used to target certain users based on their app
behaviors, and can't be used to enrich your CRM / analytics easily.
They are also a pain to manage. Third, the newer solutions that
sort of solve these problems are focused on enterprise customers,
not startups. They have extra features that many developers don't
want (such as video calling your users), and non-transparent
pricing that imposes limits on surveys / seats. 1Flow solves all of
this. We are currently open to the public as self-serve mode.
Anyone can visit https://1flow.app and create a free account to
start using it. We use Intercom to engage with users if they have
any questions while using us, but you can also ping me in the
comments here. We'd love to hear about your experiences and ideas
on collecting better feedback. If you've done any cool hacks that
got great results, we'd love to hear that too!
Author : fengjiabo2400
Score : 63 points
Date : 2022-02-17 16:45 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (1flow.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (1flow.app)
| jensenbox wrote:
| So just so I understand this, I need to spend $75 just to see if
| I like it?
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| Hey you can actually test it out without putting down a CC.
| Just embed the code snippet, track one event and then turn on
| your survey. You will start seeing responses. When you like it
| enough you can subscribe! Or let us know your feedback. We're
| also giving detailed live demos via Zoom - you can book one on
| our landing page. Hope this helps.
| jensenbox wrote:
| I would love to see that stated on the site. At this time
| there is no indication other than a button that says "free"
| but we all have been burned by dark patterns - I won't even
| click that button unless there is a clear statement of what
| that means.
|
| For me, I work on personal side projects for weeks if not
| months and need to gather feedback from my loyal fans
| (family) - I would love to see a free option for 100 or less
| users - forever.
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| Good to know, we are adding this (better explanation) right
| now on the pricing page. Also planning on a starter tier
| for your exact situation. If you want to be notified just
| fill out the pop-up widget on our site and I'll make sure
| to let you know.
| jedberg wrote:
| This is great! When I design a product I always make sure that it
| has a built-in feedback/bug reporting mechanism because I know
| that as a user I hate searching their website for the link to the
| page with the email to send feedback, and usually don't.
|
| But this takes it to the next level.
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| Thanks for your encouraging words. "The key to scaling is
| finding bottlenecks before your users do" - I really resonate
| with this (I saw your talk in 2019) and we're helping companies
| solve the bottleneck with scaling user feedback. If you or
| someone else you know would benefit from using our solution,
| we'd love to chat!
| jedberg wrote:
| > I really resonate with this (I saw your talk in 2019)
|
| <3 Feedback like this make all the effort of doing talks
| worth it!
|
| > If you or someone else you know would benefit from using
| our solution, we'd love to chat!
|
| I'm messaging you right now!
| bigbossman wrote:
| I was looking at pricing. What is a "tracked user"? I'd be more
| inclined to pay for a certain number of survey responses.
| Typeform's model of scaling price with # of responses seems in
| line with 1Flow's value.
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| A tracked user is anyone who opens your app. Yeah with people
| who are familiar with survey tools we've heard similar feedback
| as what you said. The reason we're currently pricing it based
| on MTUs is because we actually track what users do (i.e. events
| and sessions) in the background, and give you the option of
| targeting any specific user cohort anywhere in their user flow
| to get the most relevant and contextual feedback in the moment.
| So our vision is to give you qualitative + quantitative
| insights in one wholistic view. A second reason is that our
| product's goal isn't to give you some static reports, but
| rather we'd want to help you GROW your user base with insights
| - build features users care about, address the issues they had
| in your conversion funnel, so you can grow. That said, we are
| staying flexible and open-minded so some situations we do have
| custom pricing with our customers based on their needs if
| that's more special.
| nkmnz wrote:
| How do you count users from the EU who send ,,do not track"
| requests via their browser? It would actually be illegal for
| you to track them - would they count?
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| No they wouldn't count. We need to explain this better in
| our docs so thank you for bringing this up, it's on my to-
| do list now. Oh, btw we do not use cookies so if your site
| didn't need cookie notices before, you won't need them
| after adding 1flow.
| nkmnz wrote:
| Thank you for the reply!
|
| Not to be nitpicking, but it's not (only) the cookie that
| requires consent, but the storage and the use of the data
| itself. So if your customers do not have a cookie consent
| yet, they might even have _more_ work to do to implement
| your solution because they still have to ask for
| permission and store the answer.
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| For sure this is good feedback! We've planned a feature
| for explicit user consent at the first interaction, so
| that our customers who don't already have good privacy
| practices in place will use our one-click solution.
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| We believe in a privacy-first internet. We also believe
| in continuously listening to users efficiently to solve
| their problems better. I think there's a right way of
| doing it and we're on a mission to pave the way for all
| teams building software.
| nfw2 wrote:
| Some minor feedback -- I would make it clearer on the landing
| page and in the docs that there is an npm module available for
| the web integration. As a frontend engineer, not being able to
| handle software dependencies as part of my standard build process
| is a major frustration.
|
| Only supporting snippets signals to me that a company might be
| behind the times and could be dealing with globals in a way that
| would cause problems in a complex web app.
|
| Having an npm module as an integration option is a major selling
| point to me, and I think it might benefit you guys to call this
| out more clearly.
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| Great to know this! We will add this in our next version of
| landing page - thanks for telling me that npm module is
| important to you as a developer.
| devinaji wrote:
| Very cool experience! Kudos for the team on launching!
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| Thank you, glad to hear you like it. :)
| tchock23 wrote:
| I'd recommend replacing Intercom on your marketing site with your
| own product. I know they serve different purposes, but I think it
| would be much more impactful seeing you 'dog food' your own
| product.
| pl0x wrote:
| This is gimmicky and intrusive to the users. How is this any
| different from the other 999 solutions that do the same thing?
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| I think you're right in pointing out this shouldn't be done
| without respect to the users. What we're seeing is that many
| users who interact with our widgets actually appreciate this -
| they would recommend the app they're using and tell us they
| recommended the app because they felt important and their
| opinions valued. You're 100% right that some folks might not
| want to interact with this and we've optimized our UX such that
| users who don't want to interact with this, don't need to at
| all. I wrote detailed answers to why we're different in the
| original post, so I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on what
| you think on these points! :)
| nfw2 wrote:
| I could see this being useful when reporting bugs as well. Seems
| like the "Oops, something went wrong" screen is pretty standard
| for handling unexpected errors. Being able to programmatically
| trigger a user-detailed bug report whenever this happens would be
| pretty cool.
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| I love this - this is one use case that I haven't thought about
| but makes a ton of sense. Will discuss with team on how to best
| implement this. Ty Ty!
| ryanglasgow wrote:
| If you're looking for a solution that takes data privacy and
| security seriously you should look into Sprig (sprig.com). We
| work with many customers in the FinTech space, such as Square,
| who have extremely high data privacy standards.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm the Founder/CEO. Just send me a note (see my
| profile) and I'm happy to get you setup or you can create a free
| account on our website.
| dang wrote:
| You already posted a marketing blurb for your competing startup
| in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30377349.
| Continuing to do that is excessive and distasteful, so please
| don't.
|
| Because this is a YC startup's launch thread, I would normally
| hesitate to post like this (we moderate less when a YC startup
| is involved: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefi
| x=false&qu...), but I would say (and have said) the same thing
| in non-YC launch threads, and something about this case feels
| worse than usual.
|
| Launch threads are a bit different from regular threads in this
| respect. It's of course fine for users to sincerely ask how the
| launching thing is different from existing things; it's
| borderline for a competitor to post a link to their thing,
| depending on how they do it; but to try to divert discussion to
| one's own thing is just bad manners.
|
| I've detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30375868 and marked it off
| topic.
| motoxpro wrote:
| This is great. Two comments/questions
|
| 1. What comes with the free tier? Says I can get started for free
| but not sure if it is a trial or dev account etc.
|
| 2. I would love a way for the widget to close if the user clicked
| outside of the popup instead of having to click the X. It would
| be nice to have this as a setting to be less intrusive on less
| important surveys.
|
| Actually just thought of a third.
|
| The steps seem to load rather slow (well, not instant) with a
| fade effect. Totally down with a quick fade effect but would like
| it to be a bit snappier, not sure if you have to query for the
| next step but if you are, and thats whats causing the slowdown,
| maybe pre-fetch the next step (could be on hover of an answer if
| there are a lot of branches), or first step before showing the
| widget, so it can be a bit faster.
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| Great points! Here're my answers:
|
| 1. Free tier allows you to test for several days without limits
| and no need to put down CC / payment.
|
| 2. Widget to lose when clicked outside: I like this, have put
| this down on our list. This is something that I'd personally
| want to see using 1Flow as well!
|
| 3. Yeah I agree. Animation should be faster, especially because
| we load everything instantly so it's just the frontend
| animation taking time.
|
| Thanks for your feedback! Cool ideas and very practical
| improvements we could make.
| motoxpro wrote:
| Awesome! Thanks!
|
| Would love to see a developer tier. We aren't launched yet so
| it's always hard to integrate something into the product when
| you don't exactly know when that will be and have to pay in
| the meantime. Even if it's EXTREMELY limited (10 tracked
| users or something) as long as I don't get kicked out I would
| be happy.
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| Great feedback! We're gonna add this very soon, like before
| your free trial ends. Please shoot me a message
| kai@1flow.app and I'll make sure you get a tier you're
| happy with :)
| ryanglasgow wrote:
| Disclaimer: I'm the Founder/CEO of Sprig (sprig.com) - the
| industry leader for in-the-moment research.
|
| Congrats on the launch! It's great to see other companies emerge
| in this space. Product managers, designers, researchers too often
| rely on panels with people placed in hypothetical situations.
| Research is most valuable when conducted with actual customers as
| they are experiencing your product.
|
| We haven't seen the problem as you're describing for smaller
| startups. It's actually better to speak with customers directly
| 1:1 until your product starts to achieve scale.
|
| One suggestion for you is to add video questions. This is a great
| way for early-stage startups to see and hear from users directly.
| It's been so well received by startup founders that video
| questions are included in Sprig's Free plan.
|
| Also, the 50-70% response rate is suspect. Sprig has surpassed 2
| Billion unique users tracked and millions of survey responses for
| customers including Dropbox, Loom, and Square. We've seen
| response rates as high as 90%, but on average are seeing a 30%
| response rate. 1Flow's survey design is an exact clone of Sprig
| (see comparison:
| https://www.loom.com/i/356c650a70b94fffa9a85da83b546595) so
| differences in design won't be a factor. Even a 30% response rate
| is significantly higher than an email survey though which is
| actually around 2-5%.
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| Hi Ryan, nice to meet you here. I have lots of respect for what
| your team is able to accomplish in terms of being able to
| fundraise at crazy speed and valuation, and building a user
| research product that gets a few large companies to try.
|
| I've actually talked to a lot of startup founders, product
| leaders, and even current customers of Sprig, and learned that
| most didn't want to put video chats inside of their app because
| of how disruptive it is to the user experience. Zoom,
| UserTesting.com, etc. have a lot better ways of doing this and
| they've been doing it for years successfully. We think you're
| really serving big brands user research teams well because they
| really need video customer chats and because of our different
| approach to who we serve and our design philosophy, we don't
| yet see it a priority to add video.
|
| We did months of customer research before building 1Flow - if
| your users are truly happy, we wouldn't exist.
|
| With regards to the UI "clone" issue, I couldn't agree. There
| are already many tools such as Pendo, Appcues, Survicate, etc.
| that are using this approach, but as I had explained in my
| post, it is really about providing an experience both software
| makers and their users will love - at least that is the goal of
| 1Flow. Thank you for brining this to our attention, with regard
| to UI, I think we definitely can do a better job! :)
|
| Our response rates are based on true data we see. We are a
| smaller startup trying to serve other startups of the world,
| and we are not serving enterprise customers at our stage. So I
| couldn't join you in making this a number competition, and also
| not interested in. All I can say is your 90% seems one-off, but
| I understand how things work and wouldn't want to take you up
| on this.
|
| Finally I want to say that we are both trying to innovate in a
| space traditionally dominated by players like Qualtrics,
| SurveyMonkey, Medallia, InMoment, and 999 other survey tools.
| So I'd LOVE to stay connected with you and support each other
| however we can.
|
| Kai
|
| P.S. As founders we are all bit scared about competition, I
| understand. At 1Flow, we've tried our best to focus on actually
| delivering value to our users.
|
| - AirBnB wasn't the first home sharing site
|
| - Stripe wasn't the first payment platform
|
| - Facebook wasn't the first social network
|
| What really matters at the end of the day is finding product
| market fit and execute well.. This is just my 2 cents.
| motoxpro wrote:
| Great response. Looks like you guys are targeting two totally
| different groups. Sprig only has linked responses, which are
| the same as google forms, unless I "Contact Sales" which I am
| not going to do as a small startup.
| jedwhite wrote:
| Congrats on the launch. I've used Google Forms and Typeform
| before on different projects, both of which are simple to set up.
| But we've only ever put questionnaires on an external link. Do
| you have any data on whether in-app surveys get better responses
| than using a link to an external form like that? I can see why it
| would a better experience in-app, but does it make a big
| difference vs linking as far as response rates go?
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| We've seen that on average in-app surveys in general gets
| 30-60% response rates. Versus link surveys typically get 5-10%.
| Our in-app survey response rate can reach 70-80%, with the
| right placement in the user flow, and it's such a pleasant find
| for us. So in general it is a few times higher just because in-
| app surveys are shorter, targeted and seems really relevant to
| the user's current context.
| jedwhite wrote:
| That's a meaningful difference. I'd have only have expected a
| couple of percentage points. Are there any downsides you hear
| in user feedback from doing them within an app? Another
| commenter mentioned privacy concerns. What sort of stack are
| you using and could you ever see offering a self-hosted
| version (like say PostHog with analytics) to address that?
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| Yeah so from my experience a lot of tech companies are
| actually already doing this - google has their own version,
| instagram has their own version, etc. etc. The downside of
| using this approach is if you don't do it right and
| respectful to the user, you might be annoying them. We've
| addressed this with our tool with an easy control over how
| frequent and when / where the in-app survey should show up,
| so that it is 1) relevant 2) not annoying. With regards to
| privacy, we are using MongoDB cloud with standard
| encryption hosted on AWS. Later this year we're gonna offer
| European servers for GDPR compliance. Right now though,
| users can close the pop-up anytime in the flow and they are
| not blocked from what they are doing, so only users who
| WANT to tell you what they think will, and when they
| voluntarily give you their thoughts and info, that is your
| 1st party data - you have full ownership over it and you
| (as the company) should make sure to not abuse user data
| (which I really hope all of our customers do!)
| nocommandline wrote:
| >> I tried showing a pop-up in my app that led users to a Google
| form.<<
|
| This is what I currently have for https://nocommandline.com (but
| it's positioned at bottom right of the page) and just like your
| experience, it doesn't seem to have worked.
|
| Will give your App a spin.
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| Yeah my understanding for this is that when users see a google
| form or otherwise some interface that's clearly not related to
| the website, they just instantly navigate away. With 1Flow
| we're trying to optimize the experience for users to like us
| and interact / click to respond - so far it's surprisingly
| effective. :) Please give it a spin and message me any feedback
| / questions in Intercom.
| arobakid wrote:
| maxvonwolff wrote:
| throwaway98211 wrote:
| Congrats on the launch.
|
| Note that higher response rates don't always translate to better
| data. As you make the survey experience more intrusive you
| incentivize certain users to provide junk answers simply to
| remove the barrier. Just something to consider... especially if
| you decide to scale to enterprise.
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| Good point! Initially this is our way of getting in front of
| users more to get quality answers but I think your point is
| solid. We're working on a consent feature which will allow
| users who don't want to be bothered to opt out from the very
| beginning - this also helps with data quality! Anecdotally from
| today's launch I'm already getting some good, thoughtful
| responses from the pop-up widget on our website, and I think
| the data shows the general distribution but with maybe some
| noise from users who just clicked around. We could improve this
| to be close to 0% noise when we implement user consent window.
| Just getting started!
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I'm a potential customer of yours and I'm quite put off by your
| landing page. Presumably the pop over that takes a few seconds to
| load is an example of your service? It left me very frustrated
| having a white bar covering half my screen waiting for text to
| load... Why would I do that to my users? There are also a ton of
| data privacy challenges with a service like yours, and having
| your data policy (https://1flow.notion.site/1Flow-Data-
| Policy-77dda979b2794331...) say "to be updated" is very
| discouraging.
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| Thanks for checking it out! We will look into the white bar
| issue that you mentioned, this is not the expected behavior and
| in customer websites our widget would load immediately. Could
| you please send me a quick email at kai@1flow.app? I would love
| to show you how it works since you might be looking for a
| solution like this, even if you won't use ours I'd be happy to
| share my research on all the tools in the market!
| twodave wrote:
| It reminds me of the BS that the shopify app puts me through
| every time I make an order. I'm already paying for the service
| --there should be an easy way to opt out of ALL
| ratings/reviews/feedback/telemetry if I don't want to be
| bothered.
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| This is very important for us to hear. We are planning a
| feature for people to opt in / out of user research in order
| to address this. Our goal is to build a research tool that
| both software makers and their users will love, and this is
| an obvious next step we need to take!
| nkmnz wrote:
| Landingpage says ,,starts at 30$", pricing page lists ,,from 75$"
| - quite confusing tbh.
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| Oh nice catch! Corrected this and deployed - sorry about that!
| it's free to setup & test and our pricing starts at $75/mo for
| up to 10k monthly users.
| paradite wrote:
| Congrats on the launch.
|
| Actually the bottom-drawer UI is now the default for Android in-
| app store review API:
|
| https://developer.android.com/guide/playcore/in-app-review
| fengjiabo2400 wrote:
| Thanks and yes correct, the review API uses the drawer UI on
| Android. What I meant in the original post is a dialog with the
| users asking them if they'd be willing to support us if they're
| happy, and that upfront communication with the users alone
| (rather than a standard Android pop-up) did all the magic for
| me when I was an indie!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-02-17 23:00 UTC)