Awesomatic

Amazing customer service is your startup’s secret weapon against big competitors who just don’t care. A great way to delight your users is to send them a “surprise personal” email. But that means lots of responses in your inbox every morning, so how do keep doing that at scale? We’ve the perfect tool and a few tips to help.

Great advice and intro to Help Scout, a tool to help manage support emails and a great compliment to Awesomatic. 

Segment.io makes a great point —

That’s the trick to support: most support requests can be answered by anyone on our team; they’re low hanging fruit. Those are the requests that your support leader should bang out responses to in a couple minutes.

Just a couple of days after we published our landing page, we were fortunate enough to make this list of "missed" startups. We're pumped to be a part of the list and look forward to spreading the word about how we are fixing team chat.

We took a crack at letting a "handful" of folks see a sneak peek of what we're building at Awesomatic a few days ago on Hacker News, showing some of the ways we want to fix chat.

Heading into the morning of the post we knew that our message was only "80% there." Our goal was to get some solid feedback on our direction and to prove the hypothesis that this solves the problem with group chat... any votes would've been icing on the cake. The reaction we received was humbling and exciting, keeping the post on the front page of HN for over 24 hours, bringing thousands of views to awesomatic.com and almost 2 thousand beta requests.

The best part of the  is the feedback we received. We have received killer feedback through HN/Twitter/email and using those insights to improve the concept. Thanks to everyone who has reached out! Will be posting more detailed videos as we go.

We believe that team members should be effective regardless of where they sit down. That teams should be meeting-free and always up to date. That information is scattered, but with the best intentions, even though ineffective. That the concept of scouring chat transcripts to be asynchronous is out of date. 

"We are Awesomatic." Our first reaction to saying that is usually something like "Really? WTF does that mean?' Not the reaction you're looking for when pitching your start-up. We'd like to take a minute and talk about the origin of our awesome name and branding.

The Name

First, a history lesson around the space we're so eagerly waiting to disrupt. Chat has roots that go back to the 1960's, before the invent of the Internet, where two users who were connected to the same computer could talk to one another. Useless by today's standards, but eventful. The first chat room, where multiple people could talk in the same place, was created in 1974 at the University of Illinois. The side project of Doug Brown and David R. Woolley was called Talkomatic. (aha, now I see some lightbulbs going off.)

Fast forward 38 years and we're bringing "the original" back. The name Awesomatic is not only a tribute to the original chat room, but a reminder of how online communication needs to be simple (just like the original.) Tie in the face that we're building something awesomely different from what's out there today and you have Awesomatic.

The Logo