franciscassel

Taken from the same blog:

"Roughly, RAG is runtime prompt engineering where you build a system to dynamically add relevant things to your prompt before you ask the agent for an answer."

Have you considered a land-and-expand rollout, where you focus on getting an active community going in one or two cities before you expand? Otherwise, folks from underserved cities (which will be most of them) will be disappointed when they try to find interesting meetups near them using your site. Just a thought!

Spoilers:

"But the impact has actually been fantastic. Some highlights: - ~$1m of sales pipeline generated in 3 weeks, ~$100k already closed - ~10% of the free customers converted to paid - ~50% of the paying customers converted to the new pricing model"

Following the logic in the article: it's not actually a good outcome for the business when "Your QA people are the only ones charged with being an organizational conscience on the behalf of your users." To your earlier point, quality is something the entire team has to commit to.

For sure. For me, the best (worst) sign of 'not proactive enough' re: quality is too many embarrassments and/or hotfixes happening.

In my experience, many orgs that work with Selenium and its derivatives have described that (coded) approach as flaky / brittle (i.e., fragile).

Of course, until automation gets to be as clever of humans, any test automation approach is going to have some flavor of brittleness.

Totally agree that automation will never fully replace the value of human-powered testing. (Though it is great for the rote regression-testing stuff. The "drudgery", as you put it.)

Isn't the problem with relying too much on unit and integration tests that they don't consider the end-to-end app experience? (Which, in my mind, is what ultimately matters when customers think of "quality".)

Yeah, the good ones really care about the product experience and customer outcomes, so this makes a lot of sense to me.

But what do you mean?

When I was a PM, I was lucky to have a big, talented QA team, but I still knew I'd have to do a "smoke test" myself after every major feature release. I cared the most, and I knew the most about the intricacies of the product.

I've been on teams where the "siloed" QA model seemed to work pretty well -- we seemed to find a decent balance between test coverage and frequency of releases.

But this was at a cash-rich startup that had lots of money to spend on making sure we had plenty of QA headcount. That seems to be the exception, rather than the rule. Lots of startups I talk to are quite constrained in terms of dedicated QA, so the argument for empowering product managers to own quality does make some sense to me.

Alternatives I've seen mentioned on Twitter threads today: https://mercury.com/ https://www.brex.com/

Promising alternatives I've seen mentioned on Twitter:

https://www.brex.com/ https://mercury.com/

The most useful insights come from the user reviews shared to those sites.

You just have to remember that they're just like any other online review: you mostly hear from the very happy or very unhappy customers OR the ones that got asked by the company to leave a review (perhaps in return for an incentive).

Very kind!

Thank you! Glad it was compelling.

Excellent compliment, thank you.

Thanks for the kind words! Glad you enjoyed it.

ahrefs. The full methodology is described in the article.

That's a good point. I'll clarify this in the post.

Haha!

Fantastic, I'm glad to hear the insights in the piece were helpful to you, Jonathan.

Hey, Greg, I started following your work this year -- good to see you.

Funny enough, I know that Bitrix alternatives page, because they're a competitor of one of my clients in the workflow automation space. :)

-Mike

Sometimes there's no good reason to leave pricing off the site. But there are some legit reasons. E.g., every sale is custom-priced based on more than a few different variables.

Fair point! But as a business, it'd be negligent not to make your 'why' case, given that your consumers are looking for it.

Hopefully the business does it in a way that's transparent and forthright. I'm a big fan of making it really clear that a solution isn't going to be a perfect fit for everyone. No point in wasting anyone's time.

I appreciate it -- glad you got something out of it.

I haven't run into this a lot with my clients -- they've generally been on-board with the idea of creating vs./alternatives content -- but some folks do have that mental block. Talking about competitors feels risky to them.

I analyzed the online searches of thousands of SaaS buyers to uncover exactly what information they want when considering a SaaS purchase.

These are the top five highlights from what I learned:

1. The most sought-after (and often 1st) piece of info sought by SaaS buyers is pricing -- by a large margin.

Have a pricing page! If you can't share exact pricing for some reason, try one of these alternative approaches (created by an acquaintance of mine): https://businesscasualcopywriting.com/show-pricing-on-websit...

2. '[brand] alternatives' is the 2nd most-frequent search pattern.

It seems obvious to have a page on your website targeting '[your_brand] alternatives] that positions your offering against your competitors.

But only 2 of the 50 biggest SaaS companies do this!

Ex: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/comparison

3. SaaS buyers literally search for 'why [brand]'.

This is another under-leveraged opportunity.

Buyers want someone to spell out for them why they should spend money on your solution.

Make it easy for them!

Ex: https://www.hubspot.com/why-go-hubspot

4. Security is a big concern for SaaS buyers. They want to know how you're going to protect them from loss and litigation.

They're even checking out your privacy policy and GDPR terms! (Keep those things up-to-date.)

5. Your 'About Us' page matters.

Startups fail all the time. It’s not a secret.

Buyers want to know that the effort they put forth–convincing management, setting up and integrating your solution, convincing employees to use it–is going to be worth it in the long run.

Does your company have meaningful funding? Well-known investors? Is it profitable and self-sustaining? Does it have experienced leadership?

In your company’s About Us page, make sure you convey anything that can reassure buyers that the company is robust and set up to thrive.

Surprised to see that YouTube was second only to Facebook in sending social traffic to these SaaS cos. Was expecting LinkedIn, maybe even Twitter.

How long does it take the AI to learn the correct responses to complex queries?

I disagree with the "try everything" part. Startups are resource constrained, and can't afford the time or money to try everything.

(In marketing, the world of "everything" is pretty substantial, and few of the channels can be properly tested cheaply: paid and organic search, paid and organic social (which includes many different platforms), email, old-school (e.g., print, radio, and TV) media buys, ...the list goes on.)

A smart and experienced marketer will know the tools and techniques for deconstructing what channels are the most successful for direct competitors. They'll also be able to figure out the niche channels where the target audience "hangs out" that competitors haven't yet discovered.

tl;dr: Don't try everything. Hire a marketer who will help you skip the guessing game and target the already-proven channels in your market.

Thanks for the reply. Would you mind being more specific about what specific aspects of the "automated" tests are "automated"?

E.g., in the CoderWall example, is it propagating of the title tag change to all the pages in the test group that's "automated"?

At least to my ears, "automated" suggests that there are tests that are selected and run completely without human intervention. (Which is hard to imagine in the SEO space.) Is that in any way accurate?