In a world of over-produced hype videos and clickbait news story headlines authentic customer voice is a breath of fresh air. Using real customer voice in your marketing is a great way to make real, emotional connections with prospective customers, and to show real-world examples of the problems your product can solve. Though there are lots of ways to use customer voice in your marketing, one of the most powerful is the customer testimonial video.

Customers that love your product are often more than willing to help out and share their stories on camera. But to make sure you create the best possible content, what you ask, and how you ask it makes a huge difference. …

As I wrote about previously, I’ve been using Elixir for the past several months to build out our new marking video automation platform. In my other post, I talked about some of my initial reactions to Elixir & Phoenix, and tried to give an objective breakdown of how the technologies work, particularly with a comparison to Ruby & Rails, which I’ve used quite a bit in my career.

That story was not intended to be an Elixir cheerleader post. This story, on the other hand, is intended to be an Elixir cheerleader post. Here, I want to document some of the things I really love about working with Elixir and some of the reasons why I don’t think I’ll be headed back to Ruby any time soon. …

This post written by Jon Klein, co-founder at Verifiablee

Among other languages, I’ve worked with JavaScript professionally for many years. And yet still, more frequently than I’d like to admit, I manage to introduce some scenario that leaves me — at least temporarily — scratching my head, questioning the very nature of my existence (or at least the nature of JavaScript, but anyway). This week, I ran into a couple of interesting ones I thought it would be good to document.

I considered describing these scenarios as “landmines I stepped on” or as “shooting myself in the foot”, but both descriptions seemed too… dramatic for the types of problems I encountered. I settled on “banana peels” because there is a perverse slapstick comedy about these kinds of errors. What’s interesting about these scenarios not just that they happened, but why they happened. Each of the scenarios involves making what I thought was a logical series of changes, only to be hit with some unexpected result. In each of these cases, I slipped — but the language (and in one case the React framework) itself left a banana peel on the floor for me to slip on. …

This post written by Jon Klein, co-founder at Verifiablee

I have a Master’s degree in Complex Adaptive Systems. And when I tell people that, there’s typically a short pause, followed by the obvious question: “What are complex adaptive systems?”. And so I normally go on a long-winded spiel about biological systems or social interactions or turtles on lily pads or traffic jams and usually this helps people kind-of-sort-of understand what complex systems are all about.

Over the past 3 months though, explaining complex adaptive systems has become a lot easier: you know that global pandemic that we’re all living and breathing, that has changed every aspect of our daily lives? Yeah — that one. …

One of the joys of building a brand new product is the opportunity to take a step back from the tools one has been using and evaluate new technologies and frameworks. This doesn’t mean switching tooling for the sake of something newer and sexier — it means being thoughtful about ones experiences and looking at new & better ways to solve the problems one invariably encounters. So when we started to build out the Verifiablee app a couple of months ago, I decided it was the perfect opportunity to try out some new tooling I’d had my eyes on.

Rails Battle Scars

Before going any further, I should probably clarify what kind of app we’re talking about here — different apps obviously have different needs. We have a couple of different services in our product, but the app I’m writing about now is a pretty typical modern web-app, with all the baggage that entails. That means that the core functionality is serving up web content with CRUD APIs, but also means things like 3rd party integrations, authentication, background jobs, asset pipelines, etc. …

This post written by Jon Klein, co-founder at Verifiablee.

Today would have been the running on the 2020 Boston Marathon, and if everything had gone exceptionally well, I might be crossing the finish line right about… now. But of course, due to the ongoing pandemic that has changed all of our lives, there is no Boston Marathon today. If we’re fortunate, we’ll be running it in September, though of course, nobody really knows what the world is going to look like then either, in terms of sporting events and mass gatherings.

After a race, many runners write up detailed race reports describing the ups and downs of the training leading up to the race, and then all the details of the race itself. Though the Boston Marathon is not happening today, there are still a lot of stories to tell about the race, the training cycle, and everything else that has happened in the last couple of months. With that in mind, I’ve taken the opportunity to write up a Boston Marathon Non-Race Report. And like a lot of race reports, the story starts off with a previous race. …

Building a new product in early 2020 has turned out to be interesting timing, to say the least. When we started building Verifiablee in January, we had no idea how every aspect of our daily lives would change due to COVID-19. Like every business, we’ve had to make changes to how we work, though as a software startup with only a few collaborators, the day-to-day changes were modest. The bigger changes we’ve seen have come from the companies we’ve talked to in our customer development process, and how we think about our product.

Verifiablee automates the recording and collection of customer video interviews and allows you to build them into high-quality testimonials, case-studies, sales videos and other video content. Early on, many of the companies we spoke to about the product loved the idea, but preferred to use their own video crews to shoot video with customers in-person rather than capturing video on their customers’ own devices. We understand this — for companies that have the budget and the time, a professional video production team can produce excellent results. So we shifted focus to smaller businesses that didn’t have the budget or the time to utilize full professional video production teams to capture videos of their customers. …

Nothing is a more powerful endorsement of your brand or product than the voice of a real customer sharing their experiences. While traditional promotional and demo videos are important, customer testimonials can provide a more authentic and personal connection to your leads. By some estimates, customer testimonials can lead to a 62% increase in revenue per site visit.

As powerful of a tool as customer testimonials are, building the content can be a slow & difficult process. Each step of the process — from collecting customer feedback, to building high quality content, to publishing & promoting the content — comes with unique challenges. …