Using Support.

[cjoulain]

Some questions!

It looks like a license is required to use Support. Do you offer a free trial? How does an interested party know that this product is ideal for their use case? (On the website, sending an email to Zinc is mentioned. I'm guessing this is so you can chat further to discuss whether the product is a good fit for them.)

FAQ section is good and I like how you list out the perks for each paid tier. What made you decide on one inbox for hobbyist edition and four inboxes for indie edition? I'm guessing it's about scale and number of clients but wondered more about that. For the franchise edition, does that mean you create your own inboxes and maintain that? Is a script provided for that?

Are there any testimonials? Or users weighing in on pain points?

[zspencer]

These are great questions! I'm going to give @maximegalon5 or the other @zinc-collective/supported-maintainers a chance to lay out thoughts and then try and "yes, and" them.

[maximegalon5]

I think we should bundle this as an add-on for We Got Your Back <- which already has pricing etc .. This way we get user feedback and we can survey users for pricing information.

Alternatively, we add this as a paid add-on or even as a stand-alone a la carte option moving forward <- V 1.0 or 2.0?

Ideally, we should offer 1 month free trial -> monthly subscription / Annual discounted for users.

1 Month free trial -> annual(?) subscription for teams?

[zspencer]

Re: Pricing - I agree. I think technically we sell three things.

1. "Buy an Enterprise License" -> Fixed fee, grants you rights to a particular set of versions for Support (i.e. all releases in 2020 and 2021) within your org.
2. "Subscribe to WGYBT" -> Monthly/Annual subscription with a metered pricing model, focused on the niche of micro-entrepreneurs, Indiedevs, Zebras, Small Coops, etc.
3. "Buy a Franchise License" -> Fixed fee, grants you rights to resell a WGYBT instance targeted towards a particular market niche, like performing artists or small farmers); also includes a %age of gross-revenues.

Re: Decision making on features: I just made them up :). We gotta start somewhere, and am happy to hear suggestions. For instance, I think I'd prefer metered pricing, where we charge you per-non-spam message received or per-meeting booked.

Re: Testimonials - Nope, we need to do some more customer development to get those.

Re: Pain points - Need someone to do market-research (ideally by finding people talking about their pain points with our competitors, which would need us to define our competitors... @maximegalon5 / @cjoulain - Could one of you make an issue to define the market we're focusing on and the competitors in it?)

[cjoulain]

Thanks for fielding these questions, Vivek and Zee.

Is it possible for me to get access to a free trial inbox to become more familiar with the product?

I'm more familiar with Cypress but happy to learn more about Cucumber, as I see that's a dependency to this repo.

[zspencer]

Re: Free-Trial - For sure! You can either make an issue and when one of the @zinc-collective/supported team members do a "sweep" of new issues we'll add you, or you can submit a patch to the ClientBuilder which will create the inbox for you on our next deploy.

At present, because Support/WGYBT is an early-stage product there's a lot of hand-holding in onboarding new clients, which we could automate, but it wouldn't really help us drive forward the core value proposition.

Re: Cucumber - Cucumber is a tool for describing features in plain-language; and we mostly use it as a way to describe what we want the product to do through human-legible examples. It can use Cypress or Selenium-Webdriver in it's step definitions which act as the "Driver" to exercise the service via it's UI or API. At present, @maximegalon5 and I are exploring how to use behavior-driven development as a way to help contributors know how we intend for the system to work; while generating somewhat useful documentation.

[zspencer]

@cjoulain - Are there next steps you'd like us to take on this issue? Further questions? Or are you comfortable closing it in favor of issues for specific user stories or scenarios you'd like us to execute on?

[zspencer]

Hey @cjoulain, it's been a few weeks since you've last responded on this issue, so I'm going to close it for now. Feel free to re-open it or create a new issue if you have further requests for clarification or actions you'd like me to take!

[cjoulain]

Yes, thank you! I think #27 is resolved.