We decided to "eat our own dog food" for Trainn from day one. Here is why.

Thought process behind using our own product for customer self-serve experience.

We decided to "eat our own dog food" for Trainn from day one. Here is why.

In a nutshell, Trainn helps to create a self-serve product experience using product training videos. This post is about how we decided to use trainn, to train our users to create training videos within Trainn - sorry for the Trainnception 😅

The trigger,

Before launching the product to the public, we were having our team weekly catchup and just as any product owner, anxiety started to kick in and we were pondering few questions amongst us,

How are our users going to learn to use our product?
Would they understand the important features?

Now one might solve these by creating in-app product walkthroughs, writing help desk articles, integrating a chat widget within the product, and wait for customers. We took a different approach. We decided to litmus test our product and measure customer self-serve experience.

What did we do?

Using our product, we created small bite-sized "how-to videos" that explains all our functionalities. We have a feature, where videos can be grouped into a collection and shared with a unique URL. We used this feature to build a self serve video hub for our customers and made it accessible within our app. Now our customers can know everything about our product by just looking at these videos.

Why are we Dogfooding?

Dogfooding - "practice of an organisation using its own product"

  1. We can realistically understand the limitations of our product from repeated usage.
  2. Catching bugs & UX issues is faster. If an interaction in our product is annoying for us, we definitely would want to fix it before our customers see it.
  3. We can set goals and A/B test features with our own product and see results immediately with customers.
  4. We can see self-serve experience on a first-hand basis as our internal teams act like our internal customers.
  5. Finally, if our own product is not giving a self-serve experience to our customers. This product is not going to solve our customer's problems for sure. This helps us to put ourselves in the customer's shoes on the value perspective.

At present our fingers are crossed, we are observing the usage pattern of our product but the true results are when more users start using it and we get heaps of data. We hope to keep you updated in our upcoming blogs about how this is shaping up.

What's next?

We are currently working on a widget, which can be embedded within any product. Customers can search for videos within this widget.

On the longer run, we want this widget to be super smart. Pushing out the right content to the user at the right time.

We also have plans for a hosted video hub solution, where our customers can host these videos with a custom domain.

Do signup with Trainn if you haven't. We are on a mission to solve user adoption problems. Watch out for this space!

Vivekanandhan Natarajan

READING TIME: 2 MIN
PUBLISHED ON: 9/3/2020

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