[simplybastow]

Good point @gherkin!

Want me to give you a quick demo of ProdPad? We don't yet have a full video walkthrough, though we're working hard on the product tour and the help guides. In the meantime, we're on hand to help out with any questions or even to jump on a call to walk you and your team through how to use it with your own processes and other tools in place.

Hope that helps!

Janna

Janna Bastow Co-founder

[davidkatz]

A lot of companies don't appreciate the competitive space they're in.

If you're building something that addresses a novel value proposition ("a machine that turns water into wine") you can say it like it is and expect at least some conversion from an audience which cares about your promised value.

When your value proposition is something like "better product management" you're competing with dozens of products which people already use and are happy with. Just saying "we're a better tool for product management" isn't going to fly. You'll need to communicate exactly why you're better.

I appreciate the friendly "talk to us anytime and we'll walk you through it", but I think as a strategy that suffers from a similar problem. It's not going to work with a muddy value proposition, most folks just won't bother.

[simplybastow]

Thanks for the feedback, @davidkatz - I definitely see your point on this one, and it's something we're often testing (as you might expect from a couple product managers!) and working out different ways to articulate our value prop.

Lately, we've been trying out different messages for different audiences - ProdPad is just as valuable to a development team (roadmap visibility, clearer specs) as it is to the customer support team (visibility of impact/progress following customer requests and feedback), but in completely different ways. Obviously product managers are our core user base, but by all means, not the only ones.

Yesterday, we used "Build product roadmaps, manage ideas, and make users happy" on Product Hunt, which seems to have gone over well. Might test a few variations of this and see if it sticks!

Thanks again for the feedback, really helpful.

[tegeek]

It'll be really nice to create a real demo with user Guest/Guest. This helps a lot and anyone can go through the product in 10 minutes and can give feedback.

[simplybastow]

I like that idea @tegeek. We don't have it in place, but I can see how it'd be useful. We're also exploring having some key data in place as part of the onboarding (like Trello does), or somehow using mechanics of the product itself to show off how the product works (like Slack does), or even reworking the homepage so that you can start playing with the product right away (like Moqups does). There's a lot of interesting ways to get people engaged in the product right away, so thanks for the feedback on how you'd do it.

We're working on a new version of ProdPad, so I might look to include a demo version at the same time. We'll definitely keep you posted on progress if you'd like to see where that goes :)