MATTHEW CHIC: Hi, my name is Matt.
I'm the Chief Commercial Officer for FlatClub.
We're a marketplace for booking medium-term accommodation.
And I'm going to tell you how non-developers
can test beta product features with Google Apps.
So in our example, we run a marketplace
for accommodation for medium-term stays.
And we found that a common situation was
that our suppliers-- and, especially,
our new potential suppliers-- wanted
to know what type of guest demand we were seeing,
and what we had coming in.
And on the flip side of it, our guests
just wanted to ask us for what was available,
or what could be available.
So, basically, they didn't have any time,
and they wanted us to just provide them
with a list of options for accommodations
that they can book.
So we wanted to see if we can better match the two,
instead of in a typical marketplace,
where you search through listings
and look for something to book.
And we thought we could accomplish the two goals, which
was proving to the suppliers that we had a lot of demand
coming in, and, then, meet the goal for their guests, which
was that they just wanted to get options sent to them.
They didn't want to take the time
to actually look for something.
So our method for testing this out
was to do everything via very basic forms, spreadsheets,
and email.
We had already been collecting the guest searches
and that criteria.
We needed budget to actually facilitate
a supplier making an offer.
So we set up a basic form.
Asked the guests that were incoming to
just instead of searching, to fill out the form,
say what they were looking for, their ideal budget.
We set up the form so that it automatically populated
a sheet.
And when we had enough requests to look pretty good
for the suppliers, we sent out-- just copied
and pasted the table, put it right into an email,
and sent it to our group.
And we did this to an initial batch of about 200 suppliers,
and got the highest engagement rate
we had ever had on anything that we
had done so far in the product.
The call to action in the email was just
to reply with the bid and your offer,
and a link to the property that you
wanted to send them, which was quickly unmanageable.
So we did iteration two of the Cloud App system.
So we did another form, just where the suppliers could see
all of the requests ID'ed on a sheet that they themselves were
looking at right in the Cloud.
And then they went to the form, and put in the ID,
and then put in the same information.
So that facilitated our process of backing the other way.
The offers came into a sheet.
We sent it out to the guests, and then brought them back
into the website by opening up a communication thread.
And it was probably we did this over about two weeks of really
getting the language that we wanted to use correctly,
the information that we needed to collect correctly,
the format of the information that we
needed to present correct.
And then we started to build a beta product.
And the progression from doing that system interacting
with our suppliers, to the first, second, and third,
and now present iterations of the product
was something that everyone really
liked and were very impressed by.
So there's a couple benefits for non-developers to use
out-of-the-box Cloud tools to test beta products.
The first one is that they are very easy for your customers
to understand.
So if you are testing a product concept or a new process
that you want to do with your existing user base, using
things like spreadsheets and forms
and just communication on email, anyone on your team
can execute the project.
Your customers can understand what's going on very easily.
They can feed back to you immediately.
And then when it comes time to build,
your non-development team can have a much more productive
conversation with your development team.
And at the end of really doing some testing,
the non-development team has come up
with a system and a series of processes
that can be directly translated into the product.
The other benefit is that when you
start on that level with your customers,
they're going to be very impressed as you move up
the product development cycle, and then give them
something that looks a lot better.