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Re:amaze is a helpdesk and customer messaging platform designed for SaaS and eCommerce businesses. Below is our recent interview with David Feng, Co-Founder of Re:amaze
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Re:amaze?
A: Founded in 2012, our core philosophy has always been that better conversations create happier customers. And happier customers will always lead to more sales, more conversions, and less churn. To create better conversations, the notion of customer service and the “helpdesk” needs to be re-imagined.
First, it needs to work with multiple conversational channels such as email, social media, and SMS. Re:amaze offers this through a shared inbox. Second, it needs to include live chat for the modern business. Re:amaze offers this through our real time messaging platform that also helps businesses automatically engage customers. Third, it needs to support a sales and marketing function because let’s be honest, customer service is the new marketing. Re:amaze offers this via a live dashboard that tracks online customers’ activities. And finally, a good helpdesk needs to have an FAQ feature. Re:amaze offers a native FAQ management center to help businesses create and organize important content through a self-help center.
In short, Re:amaze is a true helpdesk and customer messaging platform that effectively replaces many disparate tools businesses might need to communicate with customers. If you’re familiar with Intercom, Zendesk, Freshdesk, or even Drift, then you’ll have a good idea of what Re:amaze is capable of.
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Q: Tell us about the early days of Re:amaze. What were the biggest challenges?
A: The early days of Re:amaze, like any good startup, were fraught with challenges. Everything from product positioning, pitching early investors, building our MVP for the target market, finding our first paid customers, the list goes on and on. We actually originally designed Re:amaze to be an analytics platform. We wanted to assist business owners with customer intelligence through tracking and analyzing customer lifecycle metrics. After speaking with the co-founders of some of our early adopters such as Stripe, WePay, Printful and TopHatter, we received unanimous sentiment that while customer intelligence is a great need, most wanted very customized solutions with heavy in-house components. Whereas we wanted to build software that was simple (short sales cycle) with a single purpose (easy to implement).
Our biggest challenge so far has been scale. We’ve grown quite rapidly in the past few years and it has always been a challenge to keep our tech stack ahead of the curve. As with most SaaS businesses, this is a great problem to have but also a problem we need to recognize and solve on a daily basis. Businesses that rely on Re:amaze require us to be reliable with near-perfect up-time. We currently deliver up-time of around 99.9% but we’re always striving to do better.
Q: What makes you unique in the market?
A: Re:amaze is the only helpdesk platform in the market that provides shared inbox, native live chat, real time customer monitoring, and FAQ management in one simple platform with per-agent pricing. We also attract a lot of SaaS and eCommerce businesses so our roadmap is designed with them in mind. We even have plans to offer industry specific pricing packages rather than a one-size-fits-all strategy. This is a first among companies in our industry. You can read some of our thoughts about the matter here: https://betterthansure.com/how-your-saas-pricing-affects-your-target-audience-cd8560013057.
Our customer service is also among the best in the industry. This might not sound like anything “unique” but you’d be surprised how poor customer service can be from companies that build customer service software. Our team has a unique routine that documents every customer feedback, maps them to existing product features and future roadmap resource allocations, and assigns them to dedicated staff members. It’s not unusual to see our team delivering new features or feature updates based on customer feedback in under 24 hours.
Q: What has been your biggest learning since you started Re:amaze?
A: Re:amaze is a small team. We’re only about 13 people at the moment. We don’t have a bottomless marketing budget and we most certainly don’t have a full-on sales team. Re:amaze is not actively taking on funding either because we’ve been cashflow positive for a long time now. We enjoy being bootstrapped and carving out a portion of the market in our own way. This also allows us to value each customer regardless of size unlike the bigger players who’d much rather focus on enterprise accounts. The biggest learning we’ve been able to internalize has been how to listen (really listen) to our customers in order to compete effectively with well-known industry giants like Zendesk or Intercom. This is why we are very intentional and strategic with what we build, how we build, what tools we choose to use, how to market, and how to most efficiently acquire new customers.
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Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: Startup founders always like to say something profoundly aspirational when they’re asked this question. We don’t have anything profound to say, haha. We want the future of Re:amaze to always be customer-focused and we want the future of Re:amaze to evolve in a way that is in sync with what our customers need. Re:amaze is and always will be about having great conversations with customers. This doesn’t necessarily just apply to customer service teams. Sales, marketing, operations, engineering can all have great conversations with customers. In that sense, we see Re:amaze as a communications hub for creating happy customers.
