Could you provide an overview of Plausible Analytics?
Plausible is a privacy-first, easy-to-use, lightweight alternative to what everyone knows, Google Analytics. We are fully bootstrapped and solely funded by the subscribers of our product, and we have almost twelve thousand active subscribers at this stage. We are counting stats on about four billion pages per month across several thousand different websites.
We are a team of eight people, full-time, at this stage. We work remotely, mostly around Europe. Trying to do a different style that is remote first, not many meetings, and also bootstrapped. So, basically, not following the regular VC-funded model.
What challenges did you guys find at Plausible to look for Nolt to manage your feedback?
We have a large, growing community, and we like to listen to feedback because it helps us know what to build next, and most of the features we built over the last three to four years have been based on this, thanks to the community feedback. So, we looked for a nice, easy-to-use, minimal, lightweight, and engaging platform that can fit well in our product so that we can provide the option for people to submit feedback, send request features, upvote existing feature requests, comment and check what’s coming up next and the working progress, so Nolt is a perfect place to put all that.
What are the problems that Nolt solved for you with the workflow of feedback management?
One thing we really like is that Nolt is very well integrated, so it looks like a Plausible website. It looks native and doesn’t look like you are going to a completely different website, part of that is also because you don't have to create a new account for Nolt; you can use your Plausible account for the same, and it is very seamless.
We used GitHub at some point for similar purposes, and that seamless experience wasn't there in GitHub. GitHub is built for developers, so most of our audience weren't familiar and comfortable with that. Now we have a very seamless and integrated experience, so our customers, who this is all about, can have a very easy way to submit feature requests and see what's going on and coming up next.
How did you find the setup process?
My co-founder is the developer, so he took care of the technical side. I mostly focused on the setting within Nolt and what we can do. We had a lot of stuff going on between GitHub and HelpScout’s tagging system to see who is asking for what. So we were going through GitHub and HelpScout and were putting all the popular requests in, one at a time, ourselves. When we switched to this, and customers synced their accounts with Nol,t there would already be thirty to forty popular requests.
Another thing we did was we were very able to connect the e-mail addresses of the people that already emailed us about something, say a year ago, asking for a specific feature. Now we were able to vote on their behalf within that specific thread on Nolt, and hopefully, whenever we change the status of that feature to complete, these people will get a notification even though they didn’t have to go do it on Nolt themselves. So I think all of these features helped integration from the technical perspective.
Which Nolt features do you guys use the most?
Everything! I think I can see on your notes that you are working on a changelog this quarter so then you basically have the whole process, end-to-end, will be Nolt based from our perspective. We will link to notes from our product and anyone who is asking for a feature request will be directed to the Nolt page, we will either create a request for them or they will do it themselves and then the whole process will be tagging, we will share screenshots or ideas for how to actually build and how this feature should look like and changing the status to ‘It’s in progress’ , and then ‘It’s completed’ followed by a link to check it out along with emails being sent to whoever requested that feature.
Also, having a nice little page where we can showcase everything that's been going on, all the developments over the last quarter, and all that will be the cherry on top for us. So basically, the whole idea is to use everything that Nolt offers. The whole experience will be in Nolt for our customers.
What benefits have you and your team realized?
We have always listened to feedback, and we always had an internal roadmap, an internal way of figuring out what is the most popular feature request. That's how we based our roadmap on the popularity request. It was always manual, and between different sites, so HelpScout tags were one, GitHub was the second one, and so on. Now we are hoping to shut down those other avenues. We will no longer accept feature requests on GitHub, and we will no longer tag feature requests on HelpScout. Everything will be going on in one place, Nolt, which will streamline it from our side and also from our customers' side.
We have custom-built our own changelog. When we release a feature, I can go into our CRM or CMS and make an update, post it, and then everyone gets a little notification in our app and whenever a customer clicks on it, they go to our change log and see what’s happening. I really hope that even that part will be possible to leave up to Nolt in the future.
Let’s say I just changed the status of this specific Nolt thread, it’s released, then I create a different change log which includes a screenshot or to link into that thread and then we will not tell the people that upvoted the request that it’s live but we also give a notification to the rest of our audience hinting that there’s something new, check it out.
If you only had to use one sentence to describe what Nolt does, what would that be?
“Listen to your user’s feedback”
“Get to know what your product is missing.”
It’s really helpful to have a nice and comfortable way for people to just add what they feel about what they want to and don't want to see. I think that’s the main power of Nolt. It’s more different than e-mail and better than GitHub. It’s actually very public; you can see what other people are voting on, and I think when all that is combined, it’s a nice package.