Fernand a stress free help desk | Deep Dive

Fernand, the stress free help desk designed for SAAS.

Founders 🧑‍💼👩‍💼

Co-Founders Cyril N & Antoine Minoux have a solid history of working together and building businesses such as other indie project improvmx that has recently passed 20K in MRR but it seems there time together has brought them to see a new problem. How to best enable CSA to answer support emails in a human centered stress free way!

Looking into the background of the founding team it seems they have had successful exits in 2019 (Transferslot) and 2017 (Norbert). What a great history and track record of building business for this indie hacker team. I can also tell you that based on the duo's Linkedin profiles, and my snooping, it seems they have done all this while holding down at least part-time jobs or consulting gigs, like many other indie hackers. This in my mind speaks to the work ethic of the founders and how much they want to build tools that can invoke change.

Both Antoine and Cryil seem to be relatively active on the indie hackers forums offering helpful advise to the community. Given that history I'm sure this duo has lots to offer and both are on my follow list now.

Marketing Plan 📈

With less than a month in and $230 in Stripe verified MRR, you would be hard pressed to say that there is no marketing plan for this business but I'm having a hard time finding anything other than tweets and a launch post on indie hackers. Even checking the twitter page for Fernand shows zero likes. The website has zero blog posts so there doesn't seem to be a SEO/Content plan. The team stated on the indie hackers launch that they worked for 3 years on solving this problem so one has to assume they did at least one or two customer interviews during that time and that is where the initial traction has come from.

The other possible interest has come from users of improvmx as the teams main product has a banner add at the top of the page announcing the product launch of Fernand. Even though this is an experienced team my recommended would be to switch gears and start working on a long term SEO & content strategy. Your own network will only take you so far and in a sticky space like "Help Desk" you can't just be better than the competition you have to be amazing to warrant the switch.

UI/UX & First Thoughts 📺

HOLY COW! The UI/UX is amazing you can definitely tell the team spent hours looking over every detail and it makes for a truly amazing experience. I do start to see a theme in the mockups shown with maybe a small Silicon Valley theme and I personally think it adds a welcoming vibe to the landing page.

Even the signup page gives off that perfect vibe asking for just the right amount of information. The callout here is to find a way to add social login's such as Google or Azure to increase signup simplicity. When using the signup with Google the team can make use of the "HD" claim on the token and populate the company name input resulting in less friction. They can also self select customers by disallowing signup when a user doesn't have a "HD" claim, meaning they are not part of a Google workspace.

After creating an account your given a list of tasks to complete, and while this is nice the tasks do a bit overwhelming taking up the entire page. For someone who just wants to checkout the product, I'd say a small improvement here would be to step flow through the tasks so that they do not take up the whole screen and feel like "homework". I also enjoy the fact that you can "ignore" a task when you hover just to the left of a button, and that is very helpful, in making it feel like the tasks are completed.

After setting up your account, and moving into the main screen, you definitely feel a calm feeling while you are waiting for emails to start rolling into your shared inbox. Maybe its just the ocean vibes coming from the screen 🤷‍♂️.

Overall I would rank the UI/UX and first pass through the product a 9/10. I hope that the founders can continue their promise of a calm support platform even as they add features and the inbox is full of angry customers asking for refunds.

Price 🤑

Priced at $29 per month per support agent, I would say this team is very middle of the road for support agent software. I do think that as it currently stands with the lack of support documentation, or video walk throughs this number will be hard to fetch but as the software grows this price point could become a steal.

Outlook 🍾

The team at Fernand has a very solid background and seems to know what they are doing. I'm very bullish on this space long term as more SAAS products come to the market they will need a special set of tools to manage the back office. With the product being less than a month and good early traction i'd venture to say that this product will continue its early growth.

Take away & learnings 📓

After this deep dive, my biggest take away is that an amazing UI/UX will draw you in. I've always been a very utilitarian when it comes to the frontend and this is probably because I consider myself more of a backend developer, but when you have a product such as Fernand your drawn in and want to like it. My take away here is that I should focus more on the UI of our product, maybe its time for a CSS swap out.

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