Hi there! 👋

‍

Welcome to the start of UserVitals' monthly product updates here in our blog. 🎉  I'm Tharshan, the founder of UserVitals, and I'm excited to share my progress as I build the feedback and product management tool, UserVitals.

UserVitals' journey first began in January 2021 as a result of my learnings as a product manager. Back then, I had feedback from all over the place. Sales calls, demos, customer tickets, and stand-alone emails to me personally as well. When I started out, I was maintaining a mental list of this feedback and it was small enough to just implement it in a week or two.

But then it grew and the requests got bigger, and I starting tagging my tickets and emails with a particular system to organize them. Eventually, I felt like a central system was what I needed. I did my market research and existing tools didn't adapt well enough to the existing workflow I had – where the customer conversations were already happening.

Existing tools also play a huge emphasis on just upvotes.

For me, this was quite a strange thing because I always felt the actual quotes and insights directly from the customer were where the gems were. If someone asks for a Slack app for your SaaS, naturally you would ask - what should it do? What features should it have? You start to think about an MVP for that feature. But what is useful about letting people upvote that feature? Each customer's opinions are valuable and normally you would do customer discovery before implementing a feature.

I built UserVitals to solve these problems. With UserVitals, our users can seamlessly collect customer use cases and insights. Customer feedback is more than just a number, so it's important to capture the essence of their request. This tool is not re-inventing chat tools or email, but instead, I make tools like that integrated with UserVitals, allowing for a direct link in each insight. Currently, we have a Chrome extension, Slack, Intercom, and Help Scout integration, with more on the way!

Now that my team and I have been working on UserVitals for a while now, we're happy with the progress so far and have got some great beta testers on board. As we continue to build and improve the product, I've been thinking about how I envision UserVitals in the future.

I would like to see fast-moving startups reach product-market fit with UserVitals as a key part of their product planning. The product managers, customer success, and founders using UserVitals should feel like they are able to have a comprehensive top-down view of their customers' wants and needs.

On the other hand, I want it to be an equally enjoyable experience for the end-users to provide feedback and feel like their voice is heard. UserVitals as a system helps our users feel closer to customers than ever before, and helps them feel not as overwhelmed with the incoming feedback and conversations.

Every company has a different pace for how fast they move, and how much they want their vision realized vs pivoting for the market. So my goal is that UserVitals helps them have a framework to make these decisions much easier, with the actual insight given by the customer at the heart. Users can work at their own pace and communicate their product updates with our public roadmaps and changelogs whenever they're ready.

Now that you've learned a bit more about how UserVitals began and what I have envisioned for the future, if you're interested, I would love to speak with you about my product journey and hear yours too! Feel free to reach out to me personally at @tharshan_09 on Twitter or at uservitalshq@hey.com. Or, join our Slack community to connect with like-minded startup founders and product managers!

At the end of each month, we will be summarizing our larger product changes here in our blog to keep you updated on our progress. If you would like a full list of all product changes, visit our changelog.

If you would like to give UserVitals a try, check it out here!

‍