Remember that first Black Forest cake you had?
That thick, rich mouth-watering chocolate that’s to die for? Or that easy, sweet icing on top that’s just so wonderfully decorated? How about the faint taste of cherry? Not to mention the actual cherry on top.
Damn.
That was a good cake wasn’t it?
Makes me wonder if it would still be as good without the icing. Or if the icing tasted bad.
Yeah. Maybe.
But it definitely won’t be all that much if the rich, chocolaty body wasn’t any good.
You see, you could always remove the icing and it would still be a Rocky Road. You could even remove the cherry and it would still taste like a Rocky Road.
But once you remove the body of the cake, it’s nothing more than icing.
Nobody likes to eat just icing.
The Journey
Building Qeryz is something that I’ve always imagined doing. Needless to say that the journey has been extremely exciting for me as an entrepreneur in building a product-based business.
However somewhere along the way I realize that it’s so easy to get segued on the important things. Things that really matter long-term. Things that are considered as the body of the product.
The actual cake.
Truth is, it’s just so easy to focus on the icing.
The focus of Qeryz is stupendously easy:
To get qualitative responses from the visitors of your website, directly on your website.
Anything more than that, to be honest, is just icing.
Problem is, there’s just too much icing on Qeryz right now – advanced acquisition targeting features, advanced behavioral targeting features, scheduling, user identifier, and so on and so forth. In fact, you could almost say that the cake is surrounded by the icing.
You could almost name this cake the ‘icing cake‘.
The question now is: “What are we doing to improve the body of our cake?”
How can we improve the way we get qualitative responses from our user’s site visitors directly on their website?
The sad thing is, a lot of SaaS companies compete on the variety and quality of the icing when what’s really to compete on is the quality of the body of the product.
Here’s what we’re going to stick on as a company in delivering and improving the body of our cake:
- Speed
- Simplicity
- Easy of Use
- Clarity
Four very simple, timeless things that we adopted from Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson (Thanks fellas!). People who are trying our cake will always want these things delivered. Every day. Every time.
So here’s what we’re going to do with Qeryz:
- Make our product load lightning fast. We’re not there yet but we’ve hired one of the best scalability engineers in the country to help us improve our product’s speed in terms of processing memory, I/O, batch processing, database optimization – you name it.
- Take off all forms of bloat. We’re going to strip Qeryz down to the bare essentials of user experience – go where the user should be going, do what the user should be doing on those pages, and make sure that the system executes everything that the user expects.
- Build for people who are just difficult. Either they are completely non-techy (hence the creation of the word idiot-proof), or they have minimal experience using SaaS software, or they are impatient, or best of all – they are all of the above. In such cases, it’s always our fault when they’re unable to do what they expect to do with your product. We’re making it our goal to help them use Qeryz with ultimate ease.
- We never want to mislead people to signing up (much less paying) with Qeryz. It’s just not right and it’s not a winning situation in the long-run. One of our goals is to make the website extremely clear in how it communicates expectations to current and prospective users.
These things are what’s really important to our users. Naturally it should be what’s really important to us too.
Always remember: when people who started off paying you for the cake end up with a lot of icing, your business is in danger.
