When we started out with Quepid, we found a small handful of champions that loved the idea and advocated heavily for adopting the tool in their orgs. They became an extension of the team. We engaged with them all the time. We did everything we could to take their feedback seriously. Even if they never even converted their orgs to heavy users, their feedback was worth the high level of investment.
We also offered consulting services and would use the tool on our own projects. Here we were the customer to ourselves, and had to ensure the product was stable during engagements.
During consulting, we would train up teams on the tool. We could see where they fell in love with it and where it wasn’t a good fit.
As a SaaS product, we weren’t successful. We decided to focus on just the consulting business model. In the end Quepid became open source, and the community built around it seeded the open source community.