Maqpie.com - user to user chat for any SaaS

[peggyr]

The product:

Maqpie - user to user chat that can be added to any SaaS app in under 10 minutes to enable efficient communication and improve user retention. Mapqie brings a chat to your app without development at all. Think Slack within your app. One-to-one, group conversations, emojis, file sharing, searchable history - everything you expect from a modern messenger. The product is free companies with less than 1000 users.

Case study:

It is not always clear for users that Maqpie is a chat between users of the same company and not something like LiveChat, so here is use case:
One of our clients is a SaaS for mental health care practices. They provide different services such as clients tracking, appointments tracking, notes, etc. Typically every company has 2 or more therapists and bigger companies have accountants, receptionists, etc. After integration with Maqpie all users (therapists, receptionists, accountants) can talk to each other. It's like adding small facebook messenger window to any SaaS or web application in general.

We also use our user to user chat on our admin panel (screenshot) - a chat on the bottom right is what I am talking about.

Product stage:

Launched in March (private beta with one large customer in December, beta launch in February). Today we have over 5,000 users using our solution, iterated a lot based on beta users feedback. We keep integration process as simple as possible. Maqpie is almost as easy to install as Google Analytics.

Market size:

SaaS providers. $236 billion market by 2020 – Forrester. We are not for every SaaS - that's for sure. But based on competitors analysis - the market seems to be huge.

Product analysis/competition:

There are 5 main competitors of the current version of the product: Layer, Cloudity, Sendbird, Applozic, Quickblox. Today Maqpie is the only user to user chat, which can be installed and customized in less than 10 minutes. All of our competitors require at least one day to integrate with and some of them look terrible, like a chat for hackers. One of our clients just came, subscribed to a plan and said:

Something I have been searching for, for a while. So thanks!!!

Another mentioned that our current solution just looks much better than others he has tried.

Customer conversion strategy:

There are few things we do:

1. Building great product and listening to our customers and users a lot. Hope they will recommend the product to their peers.
2. Write quality content for developers in our blog to attract developers. First blog post was promoted by Docker and read by over 13,000 developers.
3. Use publicly available channels like Reddit, Quora, Betalist, etc to attract initial mass.
4. Think to use

   Powered by Maqpie

   for customers on a free tier.

Team:

I am co-founder & CEO also co-founder of small IT company named Paralect. Except me there three full stack developers and part-time designer. I've been leading teams & building products for others for around 10 years, to name few: TheraNest & SpeakUp. I've built messaging for many products and it always was extremely expensive and painful, especially at scale. We started Maqpie to make messaging cheaper and easily available to anyone.

Roast us:

If you want just provide a quick feedback there few things you should look at first:

1. Quick features overview (two minutes to read)
2. Product in action (one minute to play around)
3. Landing site. (one minute to review)

5 minutes total

Optional:

1. Blog post about integraiton proces
2. Sign up and play around with admin panel

Thank you for reading this and looking forward to your feedback.

 

[joey1234]

@peggyr At first I thought this was letting you talk to any other user using the SaaS. Took a while to realise this was likely just a specific group/team of users.

Might be clearer if you had some examples of use to show this.

 

[peggyr]

@joey1234 Thank you for your reply - it is really valuable. I just added a Case study section to original post. Let me know if it is more clear now.

 

[joey1234]

@peggyr Ok, I think I get this. So, I'm going to use my own SaaS as an example to get my head around this. I have an email marketing service that can have a team on one company all sending emails and managing the popups etc.. If I had Maqpie then all these users can chat to each other?

My main roast would be that you are siloing conversations within the SaaS. They would probably be better off with a company-wide communication tool like Slack?

If not, perhaps a more explicit use case would be good.

For example: don't you find that current tools like Slack overwhelm your team? Add Maqpie so only relevant conversations are shown?

Finally, I hope I haven't completely misunderstood the value prop and my feedback makes sense. Cheers

 

[peggyr]

@joey1234 Great roast! You get the idea right. Maqpie is not for everyone for sure. For some companies Slack makes a lot of sense, but not for all.

There are a few reasons why you would prefer chat within SaaS vs external tool like Slack:

1. Context. You can discuss things, related to the product right in your app. This especially makes sense when you use the SaaS app a lot. Like in the case study I mentioned above, therapists spend a lot of time within the application to write notes, charge clients, enter client information, etc. It is very handy for them to discuss work with other therapists without leaving an app and losing context. In fact, we see a lot of them give up on Google talk, Email and even Snapchat and Slack.
2. Education SaaS case study. People often work in groups (and not always know each other) and it's great to be able to discuss your homework or online course right within SaaS application.

There are much more use cases. The reason we started Maqpie is because I personally built messaging for different products 5 times.

A possible use case for your product: Users does not spend a lot of time within your application, but it could be great for them to discuss popup/email statistic right within your app. We have email notifications and a message will be delivered to the another user. Otherwise, your users need to switch to some existing Slack or Email.

 

[joey1234]

@peggyr Maybe you have two markets: 1. SaaS companies trying to decrease churn 2. Teams wanting to improve communication.

As per 2. You might find that if you let a team link up multiple SaaS accounts they would prefer. Eg. If a team only uses SaaS tool A and SaaS tool B, there could be use case to have a cross-saas tool for communication.

Anyhoo, good luck - sounds like a good project!

If you want to roast back, feel free to do so here: My Superscribe Roast - Cheers

 

[amandal]

@peggyr Do you have a pronunciation guide? I have no clue how to say "Maqpie". Mack-pie? Muh-kew-pee?

Does the name mean something? I came back to this a couple days later (I was pretty confused by the demo the first time), and I had trouble remembering which item it was in RMS.

 

[peggyr]

@amandal Great roast! You are certainly not alone, a couple of clients mentioned that it's kind of difficult to remember.
Maqpie is coming from Magpie (a bird, which you can see on our logo and favicon). We pronounce it as Ma-kew-pee.

 

[amandal]

@peggyr So the meaning is from "magpie", but the pronunciation is not at all like "magpie". Got it. So it's just like the silent Q in "bourgeoisie".