What is Be Inclusive?
Accessibility is an important part of any digital product, one vital part of ensuring your product is as accessible as it can be is by performing periodic audits to identify potential issues that can be remediated.
Be Inclusive is a web app that helps you define, track, and share digital accessibility audits. We simplify the admin part of the process so manual auditing is easier to manage and share with teammates & clients.
Use Case
I started Be Inclusive because I saw a gap between homegrown spreadsheet-based accessibility audits and those offered by enterprise solutions. Spreadsheets are hard to manage and share, enterprise solutions are packed full of features but are often too expensive for agencies and freelancers.
The market/competition
Digital Accessibility is a growing market, part of that growth is due to the growing number of ADA Title III lawsuits being filed but I'm convinced that the greater social trend towards inclusion is an even larger contributing factor. Happy to have seen genuine interest growing among the designers and developers responsible for making these digital products as inclusive as possible.
That said, it's still a rather niche market and my product is serving only a subset of it (those that need to manage digital accessibility audits). On the bright side, I don't consider many others out there as true 1:1 competitors, the products I'm aware of that do anything similar are bundled with several other products and intended for large enterprise clients. These solutions are wonderful, but they're way out of the price range for small- to mid-sized businesses, freelancers, and agencies that need to do this work as well.
What stage are you in?
Be Inclusive is a bootstrapped and mature product (working on it for 3 years, 2 of which in production with paying customers) so the focus lately has been on efficiency and scaling while providing the best customer service possible.
Customer conversion strategy
Folks that focus on digital accessibility work, and auditing specifically, are relatively tight knit. In terms of social interaction I've found that Twitter and LinkedIn are two of the bigger ones, there's also a dedicated accessibility Slack workspace with thousands of professionals.
I'm just getting going on more outreach now, need to make more of an effort to get testimonials from current subscribers and am reaching out to prospects that are in the space with interest in accessibility auditing in particular. This is the area I'd greatly appreciate roasters pay particular attention, I know its my #1 weakest area and am interested in putting a lot more focus into it now.
Why me?
I've had a deep interest in accessibility for a handful of years now and recently became CPACC certified, I initially built this app to solve my own problems with accessibility audits and decided to release it as a SaaS to help others that had the same issues. While it's important to me to work towards making this financially viable, I also feel a great sense of accomplishment and joy when I get positive feedback from subscribers. That's the main thing that keeps me going.
