I was talking with David – one of my business mentors over lunch. Somewhere along our conversation I asked him what he thought about Qeryz – the new SaaS tool me and my technical co-founder are working on.
“There are two kinds of products in this world,” He went on to say, “There are medicines and there are supplements.”
Puzzled, I asked, “What do you mean?”
“Let’s face it, supplements are there to keep the body from getting sick. Supplements are often not as expensive as medicines, plus they keep you from the side-effects that medicines bring.”
I slurped my ramen – now getting a little cold.
“People don’t like spending money for supplements because they think it’s not urgent. But people will spend for medicine because they already need it. The urgency is there.”
I nodded my head. “So you mean to say that a medicine type of product is better?”
“It is a product that people are ready to spend for. A more urgent type of market.”
My talk with David over lunch left me with an uneasy feeling. Was Qeryz a supplement or a medicine? Can it be both? If it was, when is it a medicine and when is it a supplement? More importantly will people perceive it more as a supplement or a medicine?
In one sense, Qeryz can be considered a supplement in the sense that it is a tool that will be able to tell you pain points in your website from your user’s responses. By nature, Qeryz is a survey but it has a special quirk – it hauls in 700% more responses than a normal online survey because of its ability to pop-up smoothly on the lower-right side of a website.
Plus, a Qeryz survey doesn’t need to take a user to another webpage just to answer the survey questions. They can answer the survey right there on the website itself. In effect, it becomes a CRO (conversion rate optimization) tool more than anything.
On the other hand, it’s a medicine in the sense that you can finally know what your users think about your tool – and get honest, quick and accurate feedback right at your dashboard. It has solved some underlying curiosities for me in some of my websites and projects.
Since I ran my first Qeryz survey this May 2014, I’ve already collected a good number of responses.
I have amassed massive amounts of data which turned into action for me and my development team – changes in the website designs here and there, tweaking explainer videos, making decisions on our next SEO Summit event, and the list goes on.
To be honest, I was perplexed as to how to answer the question of whether it was a medicine or a supplement. Up til today I haven’t been able to place it properly.
Thinking about it tonight, it’s become clear to me: Qeryz is both a supplement and a medicine – relative to the purpose of our users. That actually makes it a very powerful product.
Medicine or supplement?
Why not both?
