After seeing immediate results with Beamer, Pepper Content uncovered the power of embracing feature requests and listening to user feedback.
Pepper Content, a leading content marketplace connecting businesses with skilled freelancers, embarked on a journey to streamline user communication. Rooted in a customer-centric approach, Pepper Content’s product team sought innovative solutions to consolidate the process of collecting and managing user feedback and feature requests, leading them to Beamer.
This case study delves into how Pepper Content leveraged Beamer’s capabilities to streamline user communication, prioritize user needs, and unlock substantial Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR). Now, 60% of Pepper Content’s roadmap is dedicated to user requests, a shift which has generated immediate results that influence critical strategic decisions.
Let’s unravel the narrative of Pepper Content’s success in turning user feedback into a strategic advantage, highlighting the indispensable role played by Beamer in this journey.
Pepper Content takes a customer-centric approach to user communication.
Pepper Content thrives on a community-driven vision, where user engagement is key to driving product growth. Pranav Goyal, the Product Manager behind Pepper Content’s AI writing tool Peppertype.ai, believes engaged users can become invaluable collaborators, shaping your product’s trajectory.
“You need to keep users engaged, even if you’re lacking from your competition in a couple of aspects, you can still win them over. We had a lot of users telling us about the features that competitors are building. They were our extended product team.”
– Pranav Goyal, Product Manager at Pepper Content
The strategies used by his product team to drive user engagement include:
- Using a changelog to communicate product updates and announce new features. Refer to Beamer tips and SaaS changelog examples to devise your approach for informing customers.
- Sharing a public roadmap with users to enhance transparency in the product development process.
- Collecting feature requests and feedback to ensure that the product meets users’ needs.
“The public roadmap becomes a part of the user journey and I could never do that with a tool that is hosted somewhere. With Beamer, I can send users updates, show roadmap snippets, and I can take them to the roadmap from the changelog inside the product.”
– Pranav Goyal, Product Manager at Pepper Content
Initially, these customer communication engagement strategies were executed using two different software solutions: Beamer Changelog to create and manage the product updates feed, and Appflowy for public roadmaps and gathering feature requests and feedback.
However, using different platforms to build and manage these strategies makes it difficult to consolidate user communication efforts, presenting a challenge to Pepper Content’s product team.
The challenge: Consolidating user communication in one single platform.
According to Pranav, the user experience for gathering feedback collection in other platforms was suboptimal, requiring significant effort from both users and the internal team to piece information together.
For example, in Appflowy users had to create a new account to add a comment or idea, an unnecessary step that added friction to their journey. On Pepper Content’s end, this process also demanded engineering effort to manually sync accounts, making it difficult to associate users’ comments with other important data.
Beamer emerged as the all-in-one solution, allowing them to consolidate customer communication seamlessly. According to Pranav, the switch to Beamer was further justified by:
- The clean and user-friendly UI of Beamer Feedback reduced friction for both internal teams and end-users.
- Beamer allowed them to communicate with users in-app, centering engagement around the product.
- Combining Beamer Changelog and Beamer Feedback facilitated customer interaction with the roadmap and voting on ideas/features.
“Beamer slowly started becoming the one place to maintain everything. We are trying to keep it very centralized because we don’t believe in using eight different tools.”
– Pranav Goyal, Product Manager at Pepper Content
The solution: Closing the feedback loop with Beamer Feedback.
Enhancing visibility and fostering participation in your product’s evolution is necessary to close the feedback loop. It allows product teams to validate new features and enhancements that users need, thus driving product adoption and encouraging continuous engagement.
Other than making users aware of upcoming changes and enhancements to the product, changelogs and public roadmaps also give them context to request features and provide feedback. Pepper Content streamlined this process by leveraging Beamer’s Ideas Portal, user segmentation, and its integrations with other tools.
Here’s how.
Leveraging integrations to automate the feedback loop.
Beamer’s integration with Zapier allowed Pepper Content to connect the platform with third-party apps and automate the workflow around feature requests and feedback. For example, any Idea collected via Beamer Feedback is immediately sent to a Slack channel with their data and AI engineers.
“Whenever somebody posts a request, we’ll directly filter it and send it to Slack so a prompt engineer will already start working on it.”
– Pranav Goyal, Product Manager at Pepper Content
Automation also allowed Pranav and his team to track, moderate, and promptly address bugs.
Validating and prioritizing new features with votes and comments.
Pepper Content’s product team validates building new features using two main pillars: innovation and user experience. On one end, their goal is to build unique features to differentiate them from the competition; on the other, they want to optimize and improve the user experience.
“Users are sticking with us because we have really good engagement going on and we’re creating a community. We are accepting their features.”
– Pranav Goyal, Product Manager at Pepper Content
With all feature requests and feedback consolidated on Beamer, Pranav was able to better validate building new features and decide on what should be prioritized based on votes and comments in the Ideas Portal and public roadmap.
Targeting high-intent users with segmentation.
Pranav Goyal explains how they used Beamer as a lead scoring mechanism and engagement metric for their SaaS tool. They found that keeping users engaged was crucial, even if they lacked certain features compared to competitors. Users who commented and added ideas became an important segment for retargeting and campaign creation.
“We weren’t using any data from the previous software. We were just using the platform, and seeing the request. But as soon as we connected it to Beamer, we could now actually use it as an engagement metric to score these users.”
– Pranav Goyal, Product Manager at Pepper Content
The results: Measuring the impact of user feedback on roadmap strategy and revenue.
Pepper Content saw immediate results with Beamer Feedback. As Pranav recounts, he was able to launch a public Ideas Portal with Pepper Content’s branding specifics in only one hour and the feature requests started pouring in within 20 minutes of publishing and announcing it.
The subsequent Ideas varied from improvements in the team’s workflow to identifying new business opportunities that generated significant revenue. Let’s break them down:
Generating over $180k in B2B opportunities.
Beamer Feedback played a pivotal role in Pepper Content’s journey to unlocking B2B opportunities. Peppertype, Pepper Content’s AI-powered platform, initially catered to content writers, using AI prompts to help them ideate and generate content.
However, as feature requests for custom prompts that could be leveraged by Marketing and Content teams at other companies started pouring in, Pravav and his team saw the opportunity to tap into the B2B market.
“We realized that we were getting a lot of customization requests and that ended up unlocking new B2B opportunities. Today, it’s a very big business line for us.”
– Pranav Goyal, Product Manager at Pepper Content
Now, over $180K in Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is being generated from this segment. Other than having a huge impact on revenue, unlocking this new business segment creates more possibilities for product expansion.
Dedicating 60% of engineering time to users’ needs.
Thanks to user feedback and feature validation, now 60% of engineering bandwidth is spent on what people are asking for rather than on previously made decisions and strategies. With Beamer, every product and engineering sprint became an opportunity to innovate and offer features and product enhancements that will improve user experience.
This switch in priorities helped Pepper Content make important strategic roadmap decisions from user suggestions, which saved their team time developing unnecessary features.
For example, the team planned on introducing new languages to Peppertype, the AI-powered platform used to ideate, create, distribute, and measure content. The initial plan included over 100 languages that would be built over two months. However, as the product team noticed that most of the requests centered around 6 main languages, the roadmap changed.
With a leaner plan of action in place, Pepper Content was able to save engineering resources and fulfill users’ needs more proactively.
“We started seeing a lot of requests regarding languages and realized that there were only six languages that people wanted. So we prioritized those requests over our plans and it worked well for us. We saw a lot of usage and received a lot of feedback, which we ended up using in our next release.”
– Pranav Goyal, Product Manager at Pepper Content
Improving customer communication, user engagement and retention.
Pepper Content’s efforts to streamline and close the feedback loop also had a quantifiable impact on user engagement and retention. Their changelog posts have received over 100 comments, and the 120+ feature requests submitted have over 1k votes and hundreds of comments that can be leveraged by the product team for validation.
“I can send out release notes faster, get feedback more effectively, provide transparency, and establish trust with the users. It positively impacted our revenue and increased our NPS.”
– Pranav Goyal, Product Manager at Pepper Content
Follow Pepper Content’s recipe for success with Beamer.
This success story showcases the impact of a customer-centric approach and the transformative power of Beamer’s solutions.
Beamer Feedback and Changelog empowered Pepper Content to revolutionize its customer communication strategy. By actively engaging users, consolidating communication into a single platform, and leveraging feedback for strategic decision-making, Pepper Content not only enhanced its product but also capitalized on new revenue streams.
Try Beamer for free and start immediately generating results from user engagement, just like Pranav and his product team.
