Like any self-respecting middle-aged man, when I turned 40 a few years ago, I took up long-distance running. For me, this involved buying a lot of shoes and gadgets and one of them was called Milestone Pod.
The gadget was a Bluetooth device that you put on your shoe and it was supposed to record your pace, length of your run, etc., and give you tips on how to increase your pace. Right before I was about to go for a long run, I opened the pod, put it on my shoes, and tried to connect it to my phone for the first time. To my surprise, no matter what I did, the pod refused to connect with the phone. I tried for about 15 minutes then got frustrated and decided to just go for the run the old-school way, without a gadget.
When I returned from the run an hour later, I had a support email from Milestone Pod waiting for me. The email said that it was detected that the Milestone Pod that I was trying to connect was faulty which prevented it from pairing with my phone and a replacement device had been dispatched to me at no additional cost.
I was blown away by the experience. This was truly a product-led support experience, an automated flow driven by the usage of the product.
In order to build a product-led support system, today you have to handcraft connecting multiple systems like a conversation widget, a support ticketing system, and a work management system (for example Intercom, Freshdesk, and Jira). However, despite connecting disparate systems, you still don’t have an elegant way to tie it back to your product capabilities and features.
Now imagine you had a conversation widget that you could embed in your app with a few lines of code and all your customer conversations immediately get linked to Tickets which in turn get connected to Issues (a way to track Developers’ work) which in turn are tied to you actual product capabilities and features (code in your code repository).
This immediately opens up bi-direction sync between your product features and customers through the work going on within your engineering teams.
This is exactly what we launched today on Product Hunt. DevRev PLuG, the first app on our platform enables companies to provide an elegant product-led support experience. Not only does this eliminate costly multi-product stack and expensive integrations and overhead, but it also puts the makers, and the developers in sync with how the product is being used by end-users and the feedback pouring in from the front office. For startups looking to achieve Product Market Fit (PMF), they now have a solution that helps them prioritize work across their teams that are truly impactful to the end users and customers and consequently the entire business.
Starting today, you can sign up for beta in a zero-touch fashion from our website and we hope you use it and provide us feedback and engage with us both on the Product Hunt website as well as our social media channels and help us make PLuG better. If you have questions, feel free to ask or just say Hi from the PLuG installed within DevRev. Just like inception, we are supporting our users through our instance of PLuG.
