Comment by nika | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nika | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes "just don't get it" so don't take this as a flame. But who is the target audience here? Regular consumers, or businesses? In the article the example is given of best buy trying to provide support, presumably for random people.

How many of those people are actually going to be responsive? How many of the questions people ask are going to be ones that you can answer? Seems like a lot of effort, for a low return...

I mean here's the funnel as I see it: A. People who ask questions somewhat relevant to best buy products. B. People who see the answer. C. People who then remember best buy in a positive light. D. People who then decide to visit a best buy E. People who then actually buy something at best buy on their visit.

It is very hard to track B-E, and E could happen 6 months to a year later.

I'm not sure how you make money by selling people a tool to let them maybe get a fraction of a percentage of people to buy something from you within the next 24 months.

But, usually when I'm this confused, it means I'm missing something extremely obvious.

Great questions.

Our thesis here is that Twitter is a major channel for businesses to interact with existing and potential customers and is only going to get bigger.

Big companies are already deploying lots of resources in an attempt to find high quality engagement opportunities on Twitter. For example Microsoft employs a whole team of support folks looking for xbox related questions and making sure they get satisfactory answers.

Most companies aren't Microsoft and can't afford that type of resource outlay, but will also want to take advantage of this channel. We hope that InboxQ will be a tool that helps them do that efficiently.

Ultimately, our goal is to help reduce the transactional friction on the channel as a whole (ie the funnel you detailed above). This is the first step towards that goal.

Hope this helps answer some of your questions.

Can't beat a major corporation already spending money doing what your tool makes easy for validation. Glad to hear.

I think that there's an opportunity for the response to have a tiny URL that leads the customer to a site which might make tracking their process thru the funnel easier.

And of course, it is probably a very different experience for an online retailer (Even someone like microsoft or apple who sells online) and I was just getting hung up on best buy (being bricks and mortar oriented... though they do sell online too.)

Anyway, thanks for answering!

Thanks for asking!

I agree with you. I think there will ultimately be different variations of the product based on the goals/objectives of the business.

Our goal at this stage was to put enough structure around the product that it would be useful, but also make it accessible enough that lots of different types of users could get value out of it. We'll move in the direction(s) that users point us in.

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