What's 2 Minutes Worth? Ask Jing and Say It Visually*

[updated to fix methodology/method point made by Tim]

One of the things Start Ups usually excel at is support. It is one of those weirdly inverse things I've seen over the years. A one or two person company goes nuts with respect to support, answering emails around the clock, sending out compiled fresh daily code, etc. Success follows, company grows, and support does't keep up, gets an automated ticket systems, etc, etc.   

In any event, here is a great little investment of 2 minutes with respect to giving the support person power to get stuff out to users vs. being an after thought of a company or lost in big company political mess.

Jing is a screen capture application with some pretty powerful features. The product is Mac/Windows and there is a free version. Here's what Casey, your friendly technical support guy, did to quickly (2 minutes) show the Mac users all about the product. The obvious next step is to include this link in the welcome or thanks for downloading email.

It's well done and is a good example for you to imitate with your own company.

Another method of getting the idea across is to give the user a tour of what it is you are attempting to offer. My good friend Matt Dunn founded a company called Say It Visually. Matt and his team create a really good/short animated story about what your company or software does. They do it in a fun way so people will stick around and get the message. One good example is what Indicee has done. You can see it right on their home page. Landing on the home page and getting information immediately is always good thing. Getting it in a more lively, fun manner is even better. Give Matt a call, he is uber-smart and worth twice whatever he charges you.

The larger message here is that there is no excuse for your customers to be confused or lost. The upside of the internet, fast bandwidth, always on, etc, is the ability to deliver issue focused videos (Jing) and big picture stories (SayItVisually) for low cost.

Comments

[Pete Warden]

Interesting solutions, thanks for sharing. In the same vein, a startup in the same Techstars class as me created SnapABug, a nice way for users to take screenshots to send in with bug reports:
http://www.snapabug.com/

[Tim]

Don't want to be impolite or anything, and feel free to delete this post after reading, but:

"Another methodology" is a pet peeve I've had since the 80s. Everyone, and I mean virtually everyone, makes this mistake, but you mean "another method". A methodology is literally a study of the method (the -ology suffix is from the Greek) and is properly used as the name of a document which describes your method.

Posted in the spirit of constant quality improvement, and not intended as an insult or a troll's statement.

[Rick Segal]

Thanks Pete, cool site!