small is your unfair advantage. show up in the chat.

Small teams spend a lot of energy trying to look big. A stock photo of an office, “our team will get back to you”, a ticket number. It’s the wrong way round. Being small is the one thing a big company can’t copy. This is part six of our weekend series on selling when you’re small.

big companies can’t do this

A big company has a queue. Your question gets a ticket number, a polite template and an answer in three to five business days from someone who can’t change anything.

You can have the person who built the thing answer in five minutes, fix the bug while you’re still talking, and say “good idea, shipping it Friday”. No big company can do that, however much it spends on support.

So stop hiding it.

“is this a real company?”

That’s the question behind a lot of hesitation on small products, even when nobody types it. Will this exist next year? Is anyone there if it breaks? Will they run off with my card?

A logo wall doesn’t answer it, and you probably don’t have one anyway. A human does. When a visitor sees a real name, gets an answer the same day, and finds the price on the page, most of the doubt is gone.

show the human

Small things that help:

• Answer with your name. “Kuba here” beats “Support Team” every time.
• Say you built it. “I made this, ask me anything” is the best line on your site.
• Be specific. “Fixed it, refresh the page” beats “we’ve escalated this to our engineers”.
• Admit what you don’t do. “We don’t do that, here’s who does” earns more trust than a vague maybe.

speed beats polish

A short, fast, slightly messy answer beats a perfect one tomorrow. “Yes, it does that, here’s the page” is plenty. You can write the long version later, on the FAQ, for everyone.

The visitor doesn’t grade your grammar. They notice that someone answered while they were still deciding.

when you can’t be online

You sleep. You have a day job. You’re on a train. That’s fine, and it’s not a reason to hide.

Tell people a human answers and that the reply waits for them. Answer from wherever you are: the chat app you already have open, or your phone. If they’ve left, your answer can follow them by email. A reply at 7 am to a question from 11 pm still feels personal, because it is.

it doesn’t scale. good.

At some point you’ll have too many chats to answer them all yourself. That’s a great problem, and it’s years away for most of us. Until then, the thing that doesn’t scale is the thing that sells.

how spookat helps

Spookat is a chat that shows your team’s real names to visitors. You answer from a Slack or Discord thread, or from our inbox and its phone app with push, so being online can mean your pocket. The widget tells the visitor a human answers and that the reply waits, and on pro and up your reply can go out by email once they’ve left.

It’s $4.99 a site a month, with 14 days to try it and no card. See how it works.

Next weekend: why you should ask the people who didn’t buy.