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Axel here, one of the builders of Epilude. Appreciate the question.

Whilst the subscription plans work as any normal SaaS subscription, we're fond of pay-once models that don't tie you into continuing to pay for a product unless you feel you continue to get value from the updates we're shipping to the product.

We currently think of model updates as part of the updates that we continuously ship to make to the product better, and so we include model updates in the "one year of app updates" that come with the Pay Once option. At the moment, I think this approach makes sense, but we're of course open to feedback.

In any case, I'll update the info on the website to clarify this. Thanks for pointing it out.

On the infobit, I've been trying to build in a similar completely local LLM cleanup step into Epilude. Willing to share anything you've found especially useful in producing good spellchecks/cleanups in your local setup?

Local voice dictation and text editing for Mac. We'd tried most of the available options but wanted something that runs completely locally, is fast and has a good UX.

https://epilude.com

Really interesting perspective

Axel here (the founder). You raise a good point and I agree with your sentiment. The aim shouldn’t be to replace direct conversations with real customers, which undoubtedly lead to insights that are hard to capture in any other way today. The problem I’ve heard from most product teams I’ve spoken with is that it can be hard to speak with customers often enough to reach this type of insight quickly enough to inform product decisions. That’s where AI-led user interviews can help, as they allow you to interview a large amount of customers and identify patterns and themes within hours (instead of days or weeks).

Ribbon | London, UK | Onsite/Hybrid | Full Time

https://ribbonapp.com/careers

Ribbon is a user research platform that helps product teams build more user-centric user experiences. We're a team of builders, researchers and tinkerers passionate about helping others understand their users and build impactful products.

We're hiring an iOS Engineer to work directly on building our iOS SDK.

More information and apply at https://ribbonapp.com/careers

Ribbon | London, UK | Onsite/Hybrid | Full Time | https://ribbonapp.com/careers Tech stack includes TypeScript, React, Node, Redis, MongoDB Ribbon is a user research platform that helps product teams build more user-centric user experiences. We're a team of builders, researchers and tinkerers passionate about helping others understand their users and build impactful products. We're hiring for roles including:

- iOS Engineer

- Full-stack Engineer

More information and apply at https://ribbonapp.com/careers

Ribbon | London, UK | Onsite/Hybrid | Full Time | https://ribbonapp.com/careers Tech stack includes TypeScript, React, Node, Redis, MongoDB Ribbon is a user research platform that helps product teams build more user-centric user experiences. We're a team of builders, researchers and tinkerers passionate about helping others understand their users and build impactful products. We're hiring for roles including:

* iOS Engineer

* Full Stack Engineer

* Account Executive

More information and apply at https://ribbonapp.com/careers

Ribbon | London, UK | Onsite/Hybrid | Full Time | https://ribbonapp.com/careers Tech stack includes TypeScript, React, Node, Redis, MongoDB

Ribbon is a user research platform that helps teams build user-centric user experiences. We're a team of builders, researchers and tinkerers passionate about helping others understand their users and build impactful products. We're hiring for roles including:

* iOS Engineer

* Full Stack Engineer

* Account Executive

More information and apply at https://ribbonapp.com/careers

Ribbon | Full Stack / iOS / Android Engineers / Account Executive | Full-Time | London, UK | Hybrid | https://www.ribbonapp.com/careers

Ribbon is an in-product user research platform that helps product teams build user-centric user experiences. We're a team of builders, researchers and tinkerers passionate about helping others understand their users and build impactful digital products.

We are venture backed seed-stage company working out of London, UK and offer competitive compensation and equity, private health insurance, 25 days PTO (excl. bank holidays). Join us!

For what it's worth I think email verification functionality would make me more keen to use a service like this!

I think it depends a bit on what type of feedback you're after. For quantitative feedback tools like hotjar.com's surveys can be quite effective (https://www.hotjar.com/tour/#polls).

For qualitative data such as user interviews/calls the solution for most teams is either to spend a lot of time on find users to talk to and set up calls or to pay companies like usertesting.com for access to their panels.

These tools don't allow you to get quick (and for most teams affordable) access to your own users for user interviews though, which is something that was enough of a pain point within my own team that we've built a tool exactly for that (https://tryribbon.com).

The Mom Test is also a great read on how to get useful user feedback in general (https://amzn.to/383bo92).

Good question, the option to video chat is only shown to your users when you (the owner of the website) indicate that you want to video chat. As soon as you've already found someone to chat with (or you cancel the chat) no other users will see the option to join your video chat.

Some really great points.

Most of the user researchers & research ops people I've spoken with currently use some form of monetary incentive (credit for their own product or cash) to incentivise users to join their user research sessions. This process would work the same with Ribbon, although outside of the platform. In the next few days I'm adding functionality for the interviewer to be able to customise what message users see in the user recruitment pop-up, so that they can let users know about any compensation they will get for their time. In the mid-term another way to make running user research even easier is to help facilitate those payments directly on the platform.

The floating video is a really interesting idea! I've opted for making the script as light as possible, with all of the video chat functionality being hosted on Ribbon. This is to make sure the script doesn't slow down any website it is added to. Further down the line it will be interesting to explore how to make the user journey even more frictionless whilst still keeping website performance top of mind.

Screen sharing is another functionality that's proving really useful in remote user testing. I'm adding that over the coming month!

Stumbled across your blog somewhere and have really enjoyed some of the posts you've written so far. Keep it up!

Just before lockdown I started a product management role at a scale-up in the UK, and to get a wider perspective of product and advice from people who have been through it before I've been chatting to other people who have built product teams. I've kicked off a blog to share what I've learnt from these conversations. Hope it's of use to others who are on a similar path!

https://axelthomson.com