Could you provide an overview of Replo? How did you and Yuxin start Replo?

We did the cofounder relationship on easy mode because we’ve been friends for 10+ years. We met each other on the first day of college orientation at UC Berkeley and we were friends, we lived in the same dorm and we were both CS majors there and we became great friends. During our time in college we developed and sold a course scheduling platform for Berkeley students. That was our first project that we worked on together and we both went to work in Silicon Valley but we were both on the lookout for the next thing to work on and then my co-founder, Yuxin, was doing a drop shipping business on Shopify and we were both professional web developers and even as a professional web designer Shopify site was so hard to customize. We realized if we are having this problem, imagine a merchant running a million dollar brand, they are definitely having this problem and they don’t even have the skills to go about fixing it. That’s how we started thinking about it. 

Most of these brands end up using agencies and because they’re not employing developers full-time, then those agencies have to deal with tech dev from the last agency and it’s a whole thing. At the end of the day, the brand doesn’t actually get a page they can customize. Replo is a tool which allows you to build these pages and customize them without hiring developers. That’s the short of it. 

What challenges were you experiencing that led you to look for a solution like Nolt?

We started a Slack community for Replo customers and it used have a few people because we used to have hardly any customers for many months and there were only a few people in the Slack channel who used to post bug reports and we would use it as our customer support channel but then we started growing and now we’re over 2000 people in the Slack community now and it's a place where people talk about a bunch of different things. 

One thing we knew in those early days wass we needed to have a way to prioritize feedback from customers. We started seeing common threads, people were asking for the same thing and we needed a public-facing roadmap/ upvote board. We looked at a few options, we were looking for something extremely simple. Didn’t need anything super fancy and definitely didn't want to pay a lot of money for it. Some of the alternatives charge an insane amount of money but we stumbled upon Nolt. We set up an account and it’s been great for us so far. 

How did you find the setup process?

It was so long ago. I don't remember anything about it, which probably means it went quite smoothly. It’s similar to how you get something out of a box and get started very quickly, we like that. We didn’t need anything super fancy. We just like to put our logo on there and it was good to go, which is exactly what we were looking for.

How does Nolt help at Replo?

There’s two main things. One would be it gives our customers an outlet to feel like they’re engaged with the rest of the community and also seeing feedback of a customer requesting something for their use case and a lot of other people also need the same thing. We just closed our top voted Nolt item which was product templates for Shopify and Replo, it was really great to be able to say ‘we’re working on it and here’s all the updates’. There’s a little bit of interaction with the customer and creating a community there and making them feel like they're involved which is important because we are running a customer centric company. 

Another thing is it helps our own product roadmap prioritization, about what we should work on next and customers have told us what exactly they wanted. Way back after we did YC, we were thinking about what part of this we should build because our product is so complicated, it has a lot of surface area and we weren’t quite sure and having an upvote board like this has helped us align on that a bit more.

How do you guys use Nolt on a day-to-day basis? What does the workflow look like?

It’s me and our product lead, she’s thinking and referring to it as the public-facing prioritization. It is not really an everyday thing but monthly planning and we figure out what’s on top of the community’s mind. The other biggest workflow is when somebody requests something through our support chat. we’ll push them to specific Nolt boards so we put that into our support flow.

If you had to describe Nolt in one sentence, what would it be?

Super simple upvote board. At the stage of customer customer that they're targeting, they need some sort of public-facing board where people can upvote features

Figma has this web flow and big tools that are interactive but they need some sort of upvote board setup and it’s dead simple to set up and use.