It’s not every day that you hear that a startup is a family business. That personal feel is at the core of FeedBACC. Finding honest, reliable customer feedback can be increasingly difficult, but it can be invaluable for your company. FeedBACC engages customers through their own preferences and guides them through personalized survey funnels — allowing them to stay focused and interested.
“If you have questions about your customer base, we will find the answers,” says CEO Jawann Brady, the fearless leader behind the family business. Brady founded FeedBACC in 2015. After some trial and error, Brady learned to be an agile leader and saw the opportunity to pivot into a larger market, based on customer feedback. (Funny how that worked out.)
Now, the Atlanta Tech Village resident is working on the most exciting part of startup life — validating his idea. Learn how he knew the exact moment he should pivot, how FeedBACC’s personalized surveys set them apart from the competition and what customers can benefit the most.
Funding or bootstrapped:
Bootstrapped all day! I’m all about the grind, and it builds character (haha). Though we will most likely be looking for a modest level of funding during Q2 of next year once we hit our projected milestones and have further validation in the solution we are trying to provide. After all the trial and error we’ve been through I feel like I have a firm grasp on this business and a clear vision for where I want to take it.
Your Pitch:
FeedBACC stands for Feeding the Business And Community Conversation and our proprietary software gets statistically significant results by letting you communicate with your customers according to the technology and lifestyles of today. Recipients are engaged based on their own preferences, and are guided through survey funnels quickly and easily due to this high degree of personalization. We, in essence, inject traditional surveys with PEDs (performance enhancing DATA) and together we will turn what would normally be failed interrogations into conversations that scale.
What problem are you solving?
While the Sales and Marketing business functions are continuously making leaps in their technologies, processes, and best practices, there is a segment of the marketing function that seems to be stuck, and that’s customer feedback elicitation. Traditional surveys usually get a 10-20% response rate for the industry we are targeting. Our solution to this problem is to adopt the mindset and techniques of Survey Funnels.
Much like marketing/conversion funnels, survey funnels break-up the customer interaction into discreet, but connected, stages and uses the data gathered from previous stages, along with any other known properties, to inform how the customer is moved through the funnel. This ultimately leads to a highly personalized experience that increase the quality of the lead and is something conversion funnels are seeing a lot of success with, so why not adopt a similar mindset to eliciting customer feedback to increase the quality of response? That’s where we come in.
Tell us about what type of customers FeedBACC would be benefit the most?
Businesses whom primary differentiator from their direct competition is their customer experience, and we currently have our sights set on the event services industry. Whether you’re going down your list of industry conferences, conventions, and trade shows determining which ones to attend for the year, it doesn’t matter whether you are going as a vendor or an attendee, one of the primary things you base your decision on is your experience. Event organizers attempt to measure the customer experience of their events by using surveys, but the problem is their process for eliciting that feedback is the same as it was 10-15 years ago when online survey services started to surface.
Tell us about the recent pivot of your startup:
So ultimately what we have decided to do was pull back on the SaaS product and offer a pre-packaged, productized, service. That way we can still leverage the software that I’ve put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into. Up until this point we had tweaked our positioned numerous times but at the core were always a software provider. This most recent change is the most significant in that we are no longer a software provider, but more of a consultancy that’s offering to get our hands dirty so you don’t have to. We have this proprietary platform that we’ve developed and have come up with a proprietary methodology that we’ve packaged up into a service that requires minimal effort on behalf of the customer to get a substantive result.
Has the revenue model or market competition changed?
Yes and no. The market competition seems to still be the same; if anything, the significant rise in popularity of “conversation funnels” and marketing automation tools further makes the case for our type of offering. The revenue model has also stayed the same, even back when we were peddling the product we had the same core offers we have now, be it a subscription or one-time use scenario.
We just recently relaunched our website to reflect the course change, and as I mentioned earlier we have identified a market segment we feel like would be the best fit for our offering, so the plan is to get very aggressive in executing our outbound strategy.
Revenue Model:
- Subscription – Customers can sign up on a subscription basis where a monthly fee is paid indefinitely, and we continuously execute one or more campaigns for them indefinitely. This is clearly the ideal scenario as the more data we have on an individual the better we can personalize their communications and the more it will resonate.
- One-Time – Customers can sign up and pay a one-time fee to have one or more campaigns executed around a singular event. There will be clearly defined goals and a finite start-end time for the campaign.
In either scenario, we have a money-back guarantee in place so that if you don’t think the value supersedes the offering then you’re not out of anything.
How’d you get the idea for it?
I believe the first remnant first reared its head back in 2011 from a consulting client I had back then. They wanted to create a platform for people to give raw/unbiased feedback about any given topic. That ultimately didn’t go anywhere and several years later my brother decided to revisit the concept ourselves, but approach it from a different direction. At that point in time, we named the product/company FeedBACC — we love the play on the word “feedback.” My brother and I have always been driven by the fact that we felt like efforts to collect customer feedback could be executed better than what seems to be industry standards. Our first run at this made heavy usage of QR-codes and ended up being a wash, but that lead to us going back to the drawing board, doing more customer discovery to try to come up with some better hypothesis, and has ultimately put us in the position we’re in today.
Who are your competitors and how do you stand out?
Obviously the big elephant in the room is SurveyMonkey; then in that same class of product you have the likes SurveyGizmo and FluidSurveys to name a couple others. On a more enterprise scale there are tools like Listen360, CustomerGuage, and CustomerVille. The biggest thing that separates us from all of those is the fact that we are not a self-service software platform — at least not yet — we’re a done-for-you service. That means, once a customer completes the initial discovery meeting their work is done, they just sit back and watch the data roll in.
Are you hiring?
At this time we are not hiring, but we most likely be looking to hire later on in the year. More specifically, we’re anticipating our first 3 hires being 2 SDRs and 1 person to work in an Account Manager/Customer Success capacity that will help in the fulfillment and execution of campaigns. Even though we’re not officially taking resumes yet, we would be love to hear from anyone that feels like they would be a good fit.
