How Alexis Tryon, Co-Founder of Artsicle, gets Customer Feedback - Fast

Ah, the life of a startup founder. On the one hand, you’re living your passion each and every day. On the other hand, it’s seemingly impossible to get it all done, and your business – and your livelihood – hang in the balance.

If you’re looking for an example of someone who’s doing it all, meet Alexis Tryon, the co-founder of Artsicle. Alexis left her job in finance to pursue her passion for art. She co-founded Artsicle, a totally ingenious way to share art with the world, especially with new art collectors.

For the love of Artsicle

Artsicle allows members to rent original art for a small monthly fee, with the option to buy if they find a piece they’re in love with. The Artsicle artists are a group of hand-selected, up and coming artists in the New York area and beyond, and Artsicle provides them with a new way to be discovered by those who are passionate about (and often new to) the art world.

For Alexis, building Artsicle from the ground up with her co-founder, Scott, was truly a labor of love. One of the most critical parts of building a new business, especially one that is centered around providing top-quality service, is getting feedback from customers. Still, with one-to-one emails, it was impossible to for Alexis find the time to reach out the way she wanted.

Individual outreach like our customer feedback campaign didn’t happen because it was too tedious.

This was a huge problem – if Artsicle wasn’t getting feedback from customers,  how did the team know what they should build or change next?

Creating A Scalable Customer Outreach Campaign

Alexis decided to try Toutapp very early on – she was one of our first customers! Once she started using Toutapp, she was able to quickly send necessary emails, without sacrificing an entire day’s work.

With Toutapp, I get incredible feedback from users I have never met on how we can make Artsicle better. We get email responses, calls, surveys completed, etc., all from a short email.

Now that Artsicle is improving and growing like crazy, Alexis has started using Toutapp in more and more parts of her business -  including in the hiring process!

She even found a pretty clever way to describe Toutapp:

Toutapp makes repetitive email stupid simple, with great data to boot.

Toutapp helps Alexis do it all. If you want to find a way to stop writing the same emails over and over, try Toutapp. Faster emails, better results. And if you know someone who’s looking for a job at a great startup, be sure to pass the message along -  Toutapp and Artsicle are hiring! 

Farzad Firoz Wins a Year of Toutapp VIP for Discovering Our Secret LinkedIn Feature

We’ve been seeing an awesome response from our customers about the LinkedIn integration we announced last week. Although we made it super easy to hook into your LinkedIn connections and use Tout to start messaging them faster, I still wasn’t completely happy with the workflow and the experience that we had.

People browse LinkedIn profiles, they view the rich information that is in there, and then they choose to message people they want to talk to. Given that workflow, it became pretty obvious to me that we needed to be as close to the Profile viewing experience as possible.

So I took a few hours two nights ago and hacked together an update to our Chrome and Firefox extensions that would place an additional button inside of LinkedIn profiles—which you could click to quickly send a Tout-based LinkedIn message to the person whose profile you are viewing.

As 4am rolled around, to make things more interesting, I decided to kick off a little scavenger hunt (instead of just announcing the new feature). Here’s the tweet that kicked it off:

In a matter of hours, Farzad, who already happens to be a paying customer at Tout, tweeted at me with his discovery. He had found the LinkedIn update! My hypothesis proved true—this was indeed the natural workflow and even such a simple button injected into a profile was discovered pretty quickly by Farzad: because it makes so much damn sense for it to be there!

Anyway—I’m really excited about the potential LinkedIn+Tout holds and am looking forward to giving more of what our customers want. But for now, Congratulations Farzad! You just won a full 1-year of Toutapp VIP.

If you’d like to be able to quickly send Tout-based LinkedIn messages, just install our Chrome or Firefox extension.