Founders Chat With Customers

A story about how Plated's founders learned from their earliest customers through live website chat.

"In the very early days, we had a chat client on the website - you'd get that sort of pop-up saying 'hey what can I help you with?' It was just me sitting there since my co-founder Nick was doing everything offline like media and operations.

I would literally sit there and talk to people on chat. Some of these chats would go for hours, which I still wonder why people were willing to spend that long talking to a random person. But they were incredibly helpful - they'd tell me why they clicked on our Facebook ad, what they thought of the website, if things made sense, if they were thinking about buying, what it would take for them to buy.

We'd then build all that feedback into the copy on the website and sign-up flows in real-time. We were spending maybe $5 or $10 a day on Facebook ads, which drove about 100 visits - enough that we could do user research in real-time. This obviously doesn't scale, but it was crucial for understanding our early customers and improving the product.

We were running this on an ugly website called dineinfresh.com - a $10 domain name we used to test and get all the obvious big mistakes out of the way before building the real brand, which later became Plated."