Upvoty - Making single overview feedback possible!

Feedback is the truest essence of business operations. With all the branding marketing initiatives undertaken by the brands, it becomes imperative for them to garner correct and complete feedback from their consumers. With the vision to build an optimum feedback software out there, Mike Slaats launched Upvoty in 2018.

Upvoty is a user feedback tool with feature voting. With Upvoty you, as a software owner, one can easily collect and manage all of the user feedback such as feature requests, bug reports, or other ideas. Also, one can implement the feedback boards and product roadmap seamlessly into the application. Users can submit new feedback or upvote on existing ones. This way, as the product owner, one is always on top of customer needs.

About Upvoty and How it Works
Upvoty - Target Market Size
Founders of Upvoty and team
How was Upvoty Started?
Upvoty - Name, Tagline, and Logo
Upvoty - Startup Launch
Upvoty - Business Model and Revenue Model
Upvoty - Startup Challenges
Upvoty - Growth
Upvoty - Future Plans

About Upvoty and How it Works

Upvoty is the solution to an endless feedback loop. The Upvoty team themselves has experienced the hassle of collecting and managing feedback from different channels such as chats, emails, and phone calls. With this platform, the users have a central place for all of your customer feedback. They can create different boards for different purposes. Users can submit new requests and upvote on existing ones. Through Upvoty they can also communicate each step of the way by notifying all the voters that a request has gone ‘in progress’ or set to ‘live’. One can also comment and create discussions with users about why they need certain features and can even create a product roadmap to show your users what’s next. That’s how the platform provides one simple overview.

Upvoty - Target Market Size

Upvoty is focusing on SaaS companies. It launched its product as a general feedback tool for basically everybody. The team that thought every startup needs feedback to build a better version of their product, so they all would want to have software like Upvoty. Wrong. If there’s one thing the team has learned is that one has to narrow down the target audience and focus on one core (smaller) group. And that’s when the Upvoty team started to focus on SaaS specifically and since then has grown tremendously.

“The SaaS market is an amazing community-driven world. We are getting tons of great feedback about our product, which helps us make it better and better.” Says Mike.

Founders of Upvoty and team

Mike Slaats is the sole founder of the company. Currently, Upvoty is a team of five and the team works fully remotely. Upvoty is looking forward to expanding its remote team with people in Europe, the Americas, and Asia because it is managing clients from all over the world. And this would improve customer support if the team can be present in all timezones.

How was Upvoty Started?

Upvoty is not the first startup that this team came up with. Before Upvoty, the team worked on another startup and it grew very quickly and because of the user growth, the amount of feedback quickly grew too. They received feedback on many different channels such as chat, phone, email, and social media. Thus, the team was required to find a way to collect and manage feedback in a better and efficient way.

They researched the existing feedback tools and concluded that there wasn’t any who was either good enough or affordable for a startup. And that’s when they decided to build one.

To validate the idea for a feedback tool like Upvoty, the team launched a landing page with an animation video and explained what Upvoty was all about. “We shipped it into the wild and quickly we received sign-ups from potential customers. After a few weeks, we hit 500+ sign-ups and that’s when we knew we were on to something.” Says Mike

And they started coding the SaaS and after 5 months shipped the first beta product in November 2018. Upvoty offered the product for free to the first few customers in exchange for feedback, which helped the team build a better first version. In February 2019 they finally launched publicly and grew to an MRR of over $1,000 in just a couple of months.

Upvoty - Name, Tagline, and Logo

The founder Mike had come up with the name “Upvoty.” He was playing around with some names and eventually stuck with Upvoty because it was playful and would suggest immediately what it does: upvote! The tagline ‘Instant feedback, instantly better products’ really assist in telling the audience what can do with this product.

Upvoty - Startup Launch

Upvoty was launched on the founder’s social media channels, who had a big follower base on both Instagram as his newsletter. He also did a small YouTube series from designing the tool to the launch. Upvoty also launched in beta on Betalist, and later on publicly on Indie Hackers and Product Hunt. This resulted in new signups for the beta type and helped spread the word of the launch.

The founder did a lot of interviews, shared a lot of the progress on his Indie Hackers profile, Twitter, and Instagram, and the team mainly focused on content marketing on the blog. Since they are more focused on their ideal ICP, with everything they do in marketing, they are getting more and more hits on the website. This resulted in more signups and paid clients. “We recently released an eBook which helped us get in front of 10s of thousands of new potential customers.” Said, Mike

Upvoty - Business Model and Revenue Model

Upvoty does not have a free plan or a freemium model. It started with paid plans right from the beginning. Its cheapest plan starts from $15 a month and allows the user to create 2 boards, have 3 team members, and 150 tracked users. Tracked users are users who participated on the boards by either upvoting, commenting, or posting new ideas. If one needs more users, team members, or boards, Upvoty has two other plans: Super Power ($25 a month), or our Unlimited Plan ($99 a month) which has everything included unlimited.

Upvoty - Startup Challenges

Branding is a major challenge in the SaaS world. There are a lot of SaaS competitors and Upvoty is in the constant need to stand out. That’s why the team focuses so much on sharing the progress with the community. They are all very appreciative. Launching the eBook, for example, wasn’t written to target potential customers, but just to share the process and progress on launching SaaS. “Because we gave away free knowledge in a space where our target audience is actively present, it did target some new customers.” Said Mike. Also, Upvoty tried to grow with paid ads, but it has too much competition from bigger software companies.

Upvoty - Growth

Upvoty recently signed its first enterprise company which is a major bank from India. They are coming on board with Upvoty for a great annual revenue plan.

Upvoty - Future Plans

Upvoty is aiming for an MRR of $10,000 before the end of 2020. “We’re hoping to accomplish this by doing more demos, making our product better for bigger teams so we can acquire bigger companies and enterprises. This should boost our MRR.” Said, Mike.