The problem you have
@rsshep is the basic concept of a mood indicator is easy to code. I’ve built plugins that do just this. Adding a dashboard that collates the responses isn’t complicated.
Maybe your product has some additional features but that’s not enough to convince a company that’s it’s worth investikng. Especially if their existing HR software already has a survey addon or extension.
It all comes back to marketing. The app itself isn’t important, your skills as a salesperson is all that matters.
Nobody wants an app. What they want is more profits, lower costs, better productivity, less churn. If you can show your app can fix any of the above and convince them it’s worth doing a trial you might get some leads. But I’d make it stand alone. Far more desirable than SaaS.
Thanks Fixicx, I appreciate you taking the time to reply.
You've highlighted that potentially I'm not accurately getting across what I'm trying to achieve, and that will impact the effectiveness of my message.
I'll start with this. The product that I've developed is literally, an MVP. It's purpose is to get a foot in the door of the market/industry. From there, I want to get people using it, get feedback about what works, what doesn't work, what's missing, and then gradually work to fulfil those needs. This will happen during a beta phase were it'll be completely free to use, with incentives once the beta period has ended (I'm talking 6 - 12 month).
I agree that it's a fairly simply product, but then so are most task management and time tracking apps. I'm not trying to re-invent the wheel, but rather offer an alternative that might be suitable for a small part of the small-medium business market. As with any app, there's a certain level of complexity that goes on behind that scene that most people don't see, such as UX design, research, unit testing, continuous integration, resource scaling etc. Those things don't directly impact the saleability of the product, but do help improve quality and customer retention.
At the most basic level, the purpose of the app is to enhance employee well-being and organisation culture by quickly and regularly tracking and analysing anonymous employee moods and the reasons behind them. It focuses on mood rather than employee engagement, because while they are somewhat intertwined, they are separate, but complimentary. Improving employee mood can improve employee engagement, and improving engagement can in improve employee mood.
There's a few key points in the purpose, the first is 'anonymous', because even when engagement surveys say they're anonymous, there's always a concern from participants that their IT department will be able to identify individual feedback through their IP address and various logs. The feedback provided will be completely anonymous and neither myself or customers will be able to track down feedback to an individual employee (unless someone is watching over your shoulder or remotely monitoring you).
The second point is 'regular'. How regular, I don't know yet. Currently it's weekly, but that will be refined based on customer feedback and potentially made available as an option. Some, including yourself, would argue that weekly is too often, and that is a valid concern and something I'm keeping an eye on. Feedback will decide the best schedule. I've gone with regular feedback because I want the app to focus on actions that are reasonably quick to implement and see results from. As you know, many organisations perform employment engagements surveys yearly (some more often), but what they're doing is comparing results to the year before. More regular and less intrusive feedback could help organisations identify some issues early so they can take immediate action rather than waiting until the end of the year. By regularly monitoring employee mood and the reasons for the mood, you could quickly identify that last month a particular department experienced low mood because they were concerned with workload and work-life balance, then implement something quickly to address that. There's various algorithms in the background that rate and score mood in the organisation and on a per team basis.
The app will hopefully enhance employee mood, by given organisations some insights into how to address feedback. For example, it might identify that your sales department is generally unhappy because they're feeling undervalued and overworked, and will provide some suggestions on how you 'could' address that, or further steps you could take. Once someone has selected their mood, they're given a selection of carefully crafted statements that they can select that best represent the reason for their mood. These short statements cover 6 areas which are known to impact employee mood (and engagement), and insights in the app will identify areas that need attention, whilst also highlighting the positives so organisations can continue doing what they are doing in those areas.
I've also put a lot of effort into making sure that participation time is as short as possible, I'm talking 2-3 seconds to select your mood, up to 30 seconds if you give a reason for mood (optional). I'm aware of issues surrounding survey fatigue and such, and I'm constantly trying to evaluation how I can reduce that and increase/maintain engagement (this isn't a finished product).
As I said earlier, this is literally a foundation, and where it goes from here is going to be determined by the feedback I get from users. I have a number of ideas that including blog posts to educate people and organisations on employee mood and it's impact, to customised insights advice/book/reading suggestions to employees after mood selection to encourage them to take action themselves.
I'm going for quick setup, easy to use, no complicated reporting or analytics. I don't believe you should have to take a course or online training to understand how employees are feeling.
As with everything, some don't believe in well-being and think that giving your employees access to a pool table and a snack bar sticks a tick in the employee well-being box. I'd like to do my bit to address that if I can. I want employers to understand the difference between engagement and happiness, that employee engagements tracks how much employees care about work, but monitoring employee mood and well-being shows how much you care about your employees. They're humans after all, who spent on average 1/3rd of their life at work, which also has an impact on the other 2/3rds of their life, and all for the grand total of £1.5m (based on average UK salary).
I'll be first to hold my hands up and say there's some uncertainty here, but I hope through getting something out there and getting feedback, I can address some of that uncertainty.
Finally, happy employees + engaged employees = improved retention + improved productivity + enhanced creativity + attract top talent = more profit. This is going to be a key part of my marketing message.
