Month: January 2017

Events

What I’ve learned from organising 25 tech/startup events in 4 months

Jan 9, 2017 by Itnig Startup Ecosystem 0 Comments
At itnig we do all kinds of events related to tech: dev events, marketing, big data, bitcoin etc.

When I started working at itnig this fall I knew I would arrange events, but I couldn’t imagine that I would host 25 tech events in 4 short months .

I’ve learned a couple of things along the way, that makes me certain the next 6 months of tech events at itnig will be even better!

At itnig we do events for several reasons:

  1. We like having smart (speakers & attendants) people at our place.
  2. We care about the Barcelona tech community, and want to contribute to its growth and quality.
  3. We want to show off itnig and our startups .

Speakers

The topic of your event can be super relevant, trendy or interesting, but if the speaker doesn’t have a “name” known in the community or work in a known company, you’re screwed. It’s the cold, harsh truth. I personally thought that if you have a topic that’s interesting, presented by someone with experience and merit, it would be enough, but it usually isn’t.

Having great speakers, that doesn’t really want to present will hurt the event (unless it’s Zuckerberg)

So if your goal is to attract a decent number of people to your event, you need to find a great topic AND a great (+known/semi famous) speaker.

However, don’t invite speakers that aren’t eager to share! You can always manage to convince someone really great to come present her/his experience, but if you have to struggle to convince them, or if you notice the speaker only attends because of having a hidden agenda (usually hiring) it could be reflected through the presentation. Make sure the speaker actually is looking forward to the event.

Also, if possible, try to book a speaker that hasn’t recently been around talking at other events in your city. You want the name to sound a bit exclusive. If you find it hard to find good speakers, don’t be afraid to find speakers internally, especially if you work in a well known startup or company, sometimes the best speaker sits just under your nose.

It’s not vital, but if you can, ask the speaker to stay behind after the event to chat and have a few drinks with the attendants, that’s always a huge plus, and makes the whole event experience much better.

Topics

How you choose your topic relates a lot to what your motivation is, what kind of community you have, and how big the startup ecosystem around you are.

One of the keys for me who’s hosting the events, has been to actively talk to our developers, marketers and product managers on what kind of topics they find interesting, or what new things they want to learn. This only works if your team actually follows trends and stays up-to-date with what’s happening in their field of expertise.

One of our best events last year was a Javascript Framework debate, which we did after talking to a lot of our developers about what they wanted to see.

Apart from this I try to get feedback from our community and of course follow thought leaders through social media and newsletters.

Make sure the topic has not been done by anyone else in the community, and if someone’s covered it, make sure you’re bringing something to the table. Tech is moving fast, nobody cares for hearing something twice.

No matter how interesting your topic is, try to always stay under 45 minutes. It’s just as important to open up to questions from the audience, than to lecture from the stage.

Attendants

So I’ve covered topics and speakers – two essential parts of every event, now over to the last ingredient — the people.

Refreshments (beer) is key. Or to put it more accurately, beer is the oxygen people breath at events, i.e an event without beer is like holding an event in space. Only very weird people that are super interested will show up.

You can never underestimate how important beer is for your event.

And even though these super interested weird people are great assets in all communities, you really need to appeal to the broader mass as well, if you want to build a diverse community.

To get people inside your events you’ll have to use an event-platform for announcing, informing and sign-ups. If you don’t have a big social media following, make sure your friends in the community help you spread the word.

We use Meetup which is great for certain things, but in some ways it’s a bit broken. With that I mean that most people that cares about tech (at least in Barcelona) are using Meetup and you can build a big community on the platform, but many people have little or no will to commit to events they press attend to.

This is an issue I’ve been talking with a lot of people about, and it seems like people are using meetup more like a calendar of events they are thinking about attending, and not something they’re definitely doing.

The best way to ensure that people are showing up, and not only pushing attend is to take a small symbolic fee (1–2 euros).

So, there you have it, hope to see you at the next itnig event! If you have a topic you think we should cover in 2017, let me know!

Startups

Customers Go First — How To Improve Your Customer Satisfaction Score and Net Promoter Score

Jan 8, 2017 by Itnig Startup Ecosystem 1 Comments , , , ,

Many entrepreneurs, technologists and product managers will nod upon hearing this universal business truth: customers go first. In the end customers are the reason businesses exist, by adopting and paying for a company’s product or service.

The term “customer success” is a hot topic these days, and can mean various things, but below I’ll explain the term with the meaning — how your company interacts with customers to guarantee success for it after the interaction.

These five words and different topics are what we’ll try to identify in the text below (or the video above).

  1. Ask — Who, what and when to ask questions to improve your product.
  2. Listen — Summarize and organize the information and share it with the team.
  3. Measure — Connect trends with business objectives.
  4. Understand — Get insights from the information you’re receiving.
  5. Act — Make decisions to improve your product, service and customer experience.

CSAT

If you have a SaaS company or any kind of software company, you need to make sure the customers have a way to communicate with you.

In this communication, you need to think about what kind of user you want to open your lines of communication with, what kind of questions they should be answering and when they should do this.

The developers at itnig are trying to figure out what kind of features to focus on next to keep CSAT and NPS high.

To make sure your customers are happy, you should measure customer satisfaction rates (CSAT). You can rate it however you want, a normal way is by numbers, stars or faces with different expressions.

In SaaS products a good CSAT is 98 and above, and an acceptable score is 90. Everything else is bad. Because the customer usually is telling you what you’re doing wrong, it’s (usually) fairly easy to get a good score, just make sure you have a great customer service team, that’s key.

NPS

The juiciest part of the acronyms mentioned is Net Promoter Score (NPS).

It measures what kind of attitude your customer has towards your product. Only the 9th and the 10th best customers are promoters, which are the best customers you can hope for. These people will promote your product to people they meet. The neutrals in the middle, the 8th and the 7th, don’t do anything for you. And last, but not least, the detractors that represent the bottom 6 of your customer base. These people have a negative influence on your product or service.

To measure NPS you can use platforms such as Wootric, Delighted or Zendesk.

You don’t need to be a Mensa member to understand that getting a good score can be pretty hard, when 60 percent of the bar is detractors.

The formula is: NPS = % of promoters – % of detractors.

So if you have 20 percent promoters, 50 percent neutral, and 30 percent detractors, you’ll have -10 in NPS score, which is really bad.

Some NPS problems are simple to fix, you need to segment the customer base and try to solve as many of the recurring customer-issues as possible. Other NPS related challenges take longer time and need bigger and more drastic changes to fix. After segmenting the customers, you need to group the feedback into components of your product and service, and put your team to work on item after the other.

Companies that takes NPS scores seriously, aim at scores between 60 and 80.

https://upscri.be/285782-2

Listen, intensely and honestly

If you didn’t pick up that listening closely to your customer is extremely important, it’s time to note that done.

But listening and organizing the data isn’t enough alone. A customer that actually contacts you to give you feedback on your product or your service is valuable so make sure the people they speak to are understanding and empathic.

Don’t try to push other or cheaper products on a customer that contacts you about an issue. You have a valuable shot at solving important problems for your company, don’t ruin it by trying to sell them more stuff they don’t want.

To get any value from these processes, you need to share all the customer feedback with the team, not only to implement changes. You never know who might sit on solutions or ideas for improvement.

To get real life examples see the video above, where Jordi explains how Redbooth tackled some of their challenges with CSAT and NPS.

This post was transcribed by Sindre Hopland, media manager at itnig.