08 May 2018
Philip Manavopoulos from Doorbell
Philip Manavopoulos is the founder of Doorbell.io, a tool for easily gathering in-app user feedback on all major platforms (web, iOS, and Android). Philip is from the United Kingdom, and has represented his country in sport competitions and played violin for almost 20 years.
You’ve had some success using Quora for marketing. Can you describe how you’ve used it?
I got started with Quora marketing a couple of years ago by accident. I happened to notice in my Google Analytics that I was getting a fair amount of traffic from Quora, and decided to investigate.
It turns out that someone had asked a question on Quora about finding a good feedback gathering solution, and someone else replied with a list of potential products. One of those was Doorbell.
Looking around at other similar questions, I saw that most of the replies were people posting about their own product in a very obvious and self-promoting way. However there’s the Answer Wiki at the top of all the answers, which was usually empty.
Given that it would be far more useful for people to get a list of tools right below the question instead of long paragraphs of self-promotion, I decided to start aggregating all the answers into the Wiki. And if Doorbell was a valid answer to the question, I’d include it in the list.
I found this to be a good mix of new exposure for Doorbell, while adding value to people visiting the Quora thread. Much better than adding yet another long self-promoting reply to an already long Quora thread!
How do you think about competition?
I generally try and ignore the competition. It would be all too easy to get caught up comparing your product to the competition, and then you’re constantly just trying to play catch-up on the feature-set you offer.
I instead try and focus on creating a good user experience for the users, while providing excellent support.
Being a one-man team means I can’t compete on features with much bigger competitors. But I can definitely talk to my customers directly, and fix reported bugs in minutes instead of weeks. All of which provides a great experience for my customers.
What’s a specific lesson you’ve learned from running Doorbell.io?
Don’t underprice your product. Which may sound a bit like the “raise your prices” advice, but I see it a bit differently.
When you’re starting your business, you might think that if the price is too high nobody will pay. But if the price is too low, how can I be confident as a customer that this is a sustainable business that won’t disappear on me overnight?
If you start thinking of the business in terms of something that needs to support you, and how many customers you’d need in order to do that, it might change your perspective a bit on how to price your product! Especially in SaaS.
That’s something that I’ve seen myself with Doorbell as it has grown and I have needed to pay for more services. If something seems too cheap, I’d worry that it isn’t a sustainable business and I might not be able to rely on it.