Parlay

@austin_federa Love video! Great shallow depth of field 😃

@philnottingham I'm pretty sure it was @thekeithf's first official company purchase!

@austin_federa @philnottingham Hahaha! All the credit goes to Wistia's Soapbox extension, a large cup of coffee, and my dogs miraculously staying quiet!

@thekeithf Also are you more focused on customer feedback/collaboration on product features or current feature bug/support?

@daflatow Wow! Excellent questions, and I couldn't agree more about the source of best feedback. Most folks are relying solely on support tickets, analytics, and anecdotal sales calls to validate their efforts - rather than proactively engaging their population to help them vet and refine their ideas. That said, some responses: 1) We use both Intercom & FullStory as well (in fact, both of these were part of our 'patchwork solution' mentioned in one of my comments above which ultimately led to the creation of Parlor). Generally, the Parlor bubble is only displayed for those cohorts of users with whom a product team wants to more deeply engaged (e.g. beta testers, a customer advisory board, power users, etc.), so most users of a product still only see the customer support tool, like Intercom. For those users who see both: Today we simply nest the Parlor bubble slightly behind the Intercom one, and on hover they separate, allowing the user to select his or her desired choice. That said, we are currently working on a feature which will allow Parlor to act as the initial interaction and filter, meaning if a user has a support-related issue, we link to the Intercom message flow; likewise for a collaboration-related activity. That's certainly the ideal, and we're looking to launch support for that as quickly as possible. In the meantime, though, we let the support tool have preferential treatment and subtly hide the Parlor bubble behind it. 2) I LOVE this idea, and is fully within the realm of product development democratization, which is very much a goal of ours. At Firecracker, we would share a preview of an idea very early on with users (literally a design mockup or InVision prototype of a potential new feature we were considering), and some users would send us literally pages of notes on how it would affect their experience, how we could make adjustments, etc. So, I think this is very much in line with where we should go. We do already allow users to connect with other users in-app in order to discuss ideas, bugs, features, etc. The short-term version of what you're thinking could simply be promoting certain users to moderator roles, perhaps something called 'Collaboration Qualified User' (this is actually a term we've been playing around with internally). Would love your thoughts on this. 3) It's actually an interesting question; we've certainly approached Parlor prioritizing the former, i.e. concept/design-stage feature validation with users. That said, we have had a small number of companies interested in using Parlor primarily for QA purposes for their internal team. It's admittedly outside of what we originally envisioned, but is an interesting use case nonetheless. Hope that helps!

@philnottingham You bet! @invisionapp is one of our most-used integrations, and there's a full list near the bottom of the Teams page https://teamparlor.com/product/t... Haven't built out Github but totally open to it - what's your use case for a @githubapi integration?

@philnottingham @invisionapp @githubapi @austin_federa Could be useful for feature requests with Parlor can be added as an issue within Github or other bug tracking platforms.

@philnottingham @invisionapp @githubapi @austin_federa @brettcasbeer We're on it!

@davygravy1337 Thanks, David! We are too! Biggest challenge? Tough one. I'd have to say managing our own emotional states, actually. The work itself is challenging, but we do it because we love it. Obviously any startup has financial and resource limitations, which can be trying. That is obviously compounded by our decision to not pursue institutional funding. But honestly the hardest aspect has been maintaining a measured, balanced emotional state; it can be very easy to get swept up in temporary feelings of stress, concern, guilt, etc., which can then distract or demotivate the team. Luckily we have a tight-knit team who have worked together for years, so we've been able to help one another manage those emotional swings well.