Instead, it is meant to highlight some of the key areas where SaaS is potentially weakest and where we (in accordance with our fine customers’ request) we hope to excel here at Market7.
After signing contract, customer cannot easily alter agreement after four months of low-usage
No online account management capabilities, must call customer support and wait for the assigned Account Representative to call us back
Despite leaving a better phone number for the Account Rep, Rep continues to call the phone number listed on the account, resulting in extended game of phone tag
Refusal to reassign account despite 4 weeks of Account Rep phone tag
Finally! Rep contact. Then 27 days go by with Rep failing to deliver promised new contract terms
After angry customer call and quick Rep follow up, Another four days pass, Rep still fails to deliver on promises
Through the entire process, customer is being charged for services they are not using
What can we at Market7 learn from this debacle? First, that customers feel vulnerable when dealing with SaaS. They are relying on someone “out there” to take care of them. They are at the mercy of outages, down-times, upgrades that result in bugs and loss of data. Because of this, it is especially important that they feel comfortable with the customer support system.
The irony is that the service is very, very good. If not for this customer service experience, I would recommend them to anyone wanting to have an online meeting in real-time. It is a shame that so much time was put into a great software experience only to lose customers because of their customer support.
Why is this different than traditional software? The vulnerability factor cannot be overlooked. SaaS companies must go OUT-OF-THEIR-WAY to take care of a simple request (like changing a service plan). Customers who get the impression they are just a number will conclude that their valuable information is at risk. “Wow, if they won’t even take the time to adjust my subscription, what will happen when I have a real problem like data loss on their servers”.
For Market7 video projects on a specific and limited time scale, producers and clients all fear that at the worst possible time (IE, 24 hours before the video is set to air) Market7 might not be there for them. As a result, it is crucial that we do three things for each and every customer:
Make it easy for them to contact help
Accept responsibility and encourage open communication
Keep them constantly updated about progress and follow through the conclusion
A big “yay” from me on Market7 having a product manager. And he’s a good one! And he’s less-than-horrible at Wii golf. Nicholas has spent the last five years preserving security on the Internet in these wild lands we’ve heard about south of San Francisco. Now he returns to SF to enhance organizational management of video. Welcome back to civilization Nicholas.
Market7 is getting very close to selling our stuff. This may seem odd as our Web site is still light on details of exactly what we provide. There are reasons for that, and we’ll try to get a couple of things done and then start disclosing more publicly soon. If you’re interested to learn more in the mean time, please contact us!
Anyhow, the topic of this post, related to our starting sales soon, is to provide some flavor of what we’re encountering in the rising load of meetings with prospective customers we’re having.
We can convey that video.market7.com is generally an online solution for enhancing video production efforts, with benefits that include making them more efficient and improving the quality of end results. One of the premises of our company is that every professional organization, be it a corporation, government office, religious institution, and so on, and so forth — they all need to concern themselves with video production these days, just like every organization had to get serious about its Web presence during the mid-1990s. We find ourselves calling on a large variety of kinds of organizations, and in so doing are increaingly noting that several vertical industries that we address are each distinctive and substantial markets.
One fun recent meeting we had was with the video production crew of one of the Bay Area’s professional sports teams. They have to produce hundreds of videos a year for a variety of purposes including what’s shown during stoppage of action during live games and public service announcements featuring the team’s athletes for various good causes. We learned that the more than 100 major league sports teams and more than 100 division 1 universities, as well as hundreds each of less prominent professional sports teams and smaller colleges, generally share related needs, such as more effective means to coordinate many simultaneous projects and to identify opportunities for re-purposing footage.
Another notable recent encounter, slightly less fun than meeting with a sports team, was with a litigator friend of ours. He told of the requirements of media production for evidence in the midst of law suits. These projects can come up on a few hours’ notice for usage the very next day, so the onus is on intensive interaction for rapid turnaround. And for better or worse, there are certainly more litigators out there for us to address than there are professional and college sports teams combined.
Not dull to begin with, building a start-up gets increasingly exciting as customer engagement intensifies. With our rising sense of the distinctive needs and substantial opportunities we can address across the many verticals Market7 can serve, we’re now accelerating on our unmitigated thrill-ride.
What is a longshot? No, not my favorite pony bet. It’s a camera framing description. Here I break down all the different types of shots and what they look like and when you would want to use them. I have also provided a cheat sheet so you can impress all of your friends at your upcoming video production parties.
Torrential thanks onto colleagues (& our families & friends), contractors, participants in more than 30 pilot projects, investors, service providers to us (favorites of which are at Pivotal Labs), our vendors, advisors, collaborators on various initiatives.
It’s five minutes before the big client meeting. You are a bit nervous but prepared…or are you?
Who are you dealing with? A Lion/orange (Action-oriented risk-taker)? A Monkey/blue (Compassionate connector)? A Turtle/gold (Responsible organizer)? or a Giraffe/green (Thinker)?
When presenting a project to a prospective client, keep their personality type in mind and adjust your pitch to appeal to their specific interest points. Here is a short video of how to handle each type.
Market7 activities are increasingly synchronized around our plans to launch commercial activity within a few months. What we’re developing is based on market research efforts that started two years ago, we are approaching nine months of engineering work completed, and there have been real-world video production projects engaging in pilot usage of our software since April. Feeling good about progress, we’re preparing to soon turn on the cash registers, establish the value that our software-as-service provides, and start constructing a top line that will provide for growing, sustainable and self-sufficient operations. Approaching this milestone involves vital coordination among the activities of each employee, technical or business, and there is an exciting vibe of our efforts converging.
We anticipate that our commercial launch will be several months ahead of a marketing launch in which we’ll endeavor to expand awareness of our value proposition and thereby accelerate growth. Commercial launch is of course itself a vital step in our journey. If you are interested to explore becoming one of our pioneering commercial customers (we are devising some incentives), or if you want to get in on the last several months of our pre-commercial pilot program, please let us know.
If a tree captured on video falls in the woods, does it make a (good) sound? The basics of sound are explored after which you will be able to literally hear a pin drop:
Happy Independence Day. It’s also now the month of our company’s birthday. Operations started on July 30 of last year, so Market7 traces back to 7/07. And today’s holiday during this seventh month of the year is closely connected to our name. The essence of Market7 is to enhance collaboration on creative projects by diverse working groups. It turns out that American independence provides an elegant metaphor.
To draft the Declaration of Independence, the Second Continental Congress designated a “committee of five” selected for geographic diversity including Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson, John Adams of Massachusetts, and Pennsylvanian Benjamin Franklin. Feedback from Adams and Franklin on Jefferson’s drafting was incorporated into the final document. A process similar to how we incorporate feedback at the various stages of video production such as conceptualization, scripting and footage review.
A diverse committee under tight time pressure collaborating on a notable creative endeavor. Nice parallel. But why “Market7″? The intersection of those two streets in Philadelphia is where Jefferson boarded and probably did most of his drafting work. There are some additional cute connections of the name to what our company does and plans to do, and some of the motivation is incorporated in our logo as well, which I’m sure will be touched on in future blog posts, so please come back!
A last note, on the above painting by Gerome Ferris. It’s the exact story behind our name, including the crumpled up drafts on the floor before the founding fathers. I happened upon a jigsaw puzzle of this painting during a family excursion last year, and the partially constructed puzzle has occupied a spare table in our office ever since.
One fun recent meeting we had was with the video production crew of one of the Bay Area’s professional sports teams. They have to produce hundreds of videos a year for a variety of purposes including what’s shown during stoppage of action during live games and public service announcements featuring the team’s athletes for various good causes. We learned that the more than 100 major league sports teams and more than 100 division 1 universities, as well as hundreds each of less prominent professional sports teams and smaller colleges, generally share related needs, such as more effective means to coordinate many simultaneous projects and to identify opportunities for re-purposing footage.
Another notable recent encounter, slightly less fun than meeting with a sports team, was with a litigator friend of ours. He told of the requirements of media production for evidence in the midst of law suits. These projects can come up on a few hours’ notice for usage the very next day, so the onus is on intensive interaction for rapid turnaround. And for better or worse, there are certainly more litigators out there for us to address than there are professional and college sports teams combined.
