2019 recap & 2020 outlook

2019 recap & 2020 outlook

Product Updates ·

With 2020 in full swing and with 2019 behind us, we want to take a moment to reflect on what we, at Layerise, have achieved during the last 12 months. At the beginning of 2019, we outlined a product vision and an ambitious and aggressive execution roadmap, including all the features and functionality that we found essential to unlock even greater customer satisfaction.

A year of growth and rapid product development

Looking back at our achievements in 2019, there is no doubt that we have taken a huge leap forward with our product, design and solution. Since Jan 2019, we have quadrupled the number of clients and have, at the same time, reached thousands of end-users across all seven continents with outstanding Product Assistant usage.

This is a noticeable acknowledgment of our platform, as this past year, we focused on unique end-user product experiences, increase in features and improved service value, and at the same time have done significant work to ensure that brands using our platform have the best-in-class tools and support. The work that has been accomplished has further enhanced our ability to support a wide range of product categories and improve customer post-sale experiences.

Our commitment to continually push updates and improvements, while at the same time work on enhanced platform architecture and data portability has allowed us to see significant positive returns both with clients and Product Assistant end-customers. At the same time, we have been hard at work promoting sustainable environmental choices while growing or expanding business ventures. We are therefore incredibly proud that more brands have decided to join Layerise’s efforts to minimise paper production and usage by utilising digital and smart Product Assistants to provide an even more excellent post-sales experience for their customers.

Product Assistant growth

Layerise has been attractive and popular among brands with unique and smart products, making our Product Assistant solution a perfect fit for their efforts to provide their customers with the best product onboarding and guide. This alone has meant that customers are experiencing the full potential of their devices while using the Layerise-powered Product Assistant.

Chart

Since the day we started rolling out our Product Assistant Gen.1, we have seen impressive growth and adoption rates. During early 2019 customer growth and product, registration was driven by a small number of deployed Product Assistants. Still, as we moved into Q2 and throughout 2019, we have recorded doubling rates several times. It has been exciting to see customer adoption and the rate of which more and more customers are registering multiple devices. This growth translates into the evidence that customers are expecting better and more useful post-sales customer experiences and will, in the future, have more significant product onboarding requirements. Besides, every time a customer has used the fully digital Product Assistant in the past year, we have saved earth that incremental negative ecological trail that paper production, colour cartridges and distribution/shipment provide.

Making platform stakeholders happier

All parts of the Layerise platform and offering have been improved by great lengths. Over the last 12 months, we have doubled the team to execute faster and to return great productivity value for all platform stakeholders.

Improved user experience

We started 2019 off by releasing the Product Assistant Gen.1. Since then, the Product Assistant has received more than 400 feature, performance and enhancement updates. In the same period, the Product Assistant UI has been renewed several times to cope with the increasing feature richness and to better adapt to the growing variety of customer usage patterns.

Here are a few screenshots from different points in the year to see the Product Assistant speedy progression:

assistant evolution

As evident to the screenshots above, we ended 2019 with releasing the Product Assistant Gen. 2, which marked a new level of platform maturity. Among many enhancements during the year here are the most crucial:

  • Customer & Product Registration: the best and easiest way for customers to register their product ownership.

  • Highlights format: allowing customers to gain crucial product know-how and guidance with the “story” like Highlight format.

  • Reminders: an effective time-based event to help customers perform specific tasks as a recurring event.

  • Dialog: enabling brands and customers to engage in a smart and premium dialog without the need for exchanging basic ownership and product info.

  • PWA install: helping customers to install the Product Assistant on their device without the Play Store and App Store hassle.

Admin work as a superpower

Equally, as with the Product Assistant, we have released more than 700 incremental Layerise Admin updates aimed at improved features, productivity score, and performance KPI’s. We have also taken significant steps in its platform architecture. As we have been pushing for broader data portability and making our offering easier to use, we have seen great feedback and recognition from brands and industries. Our focus to push effective, stable and powerful offerings has meant that brands, technical writers and customer service users have been able to provide customers with fantastic product experience value as evident below to the evolution of the Layerise Admin.

admin

2019's big successes include:

  • Product management: brands can automatically create Product Assistants and manage availability and identification.

  • End-to-end WYSIWIG: allowing technical writers to work within the same context as the customer will consume content. It allows for fast content creation and effective fine-tuning with insignificant revision loops.

  • Customer reach: brands can, with ease reach out to any customer based on a variety of customer satisfaction signals.

  • Insights: easy and quick insight into customer demographics, customer product onboarding performance and product feedback/issue tracking

  • Organisation API: provide the ability for any brand to use their content outside the individual Product Assistant and create other solutions.

Funding and focus

Throughout 2019 we have frequently been asked about our decision to grow Layerise with a self-funded mindset, and with good reason as it’s somewhat easy to become mesmerised with a long line of zeros ticking from investors. But for us, it has been essential to remain grounded and keep our fingers on the adoption of our offering. Thus far, this has been an excellent decision for us, as we have been able to push ideas, make changes and test opportunities fast and without any concern for broader approval. Furthermore, while it’s given that funding injections can provide execution uplift, it also comes with its challenges and drag, something we thought would not benefit our product execution focus and plan. The 2019 growth has been primarily driven by a focus on personal sales and a keen eye on sustainable product delivery practices. Something that has provided us with tremendous knowledge throughout 2019, and which has been an instrumental part of our long-term product focus but allowed us to effectively navigate as we grow.

2020 plan!

We have spent most of the last few weeks planning the 2020 roadmap. During the next year, we will be continuing our release practice with several updates going out every month, each focusing on known and new areas of the platform. 2019 has provided us with a long wishlist that we are currently mapping out. Among several innovative initiatives that we have started to design and test, we are going to work hard on building solutions that bring customers and brands even closer together. At the same time, our data has shown that customers are looking for collaboration and information exchange between them and other users of the same product. Finally, we are going to expand our platform into an ecosystem that embraces complementary solutions in our efforts to build the leading Product Assistant solution for brands.

Thank you for your support!

We want to say Thank You! Thank you for your support and trust in Layerise. We have come a long way in 2019, and this has been due to your patience and belief in our ideas and solutions. This has now become a strong foundation for us to further develop outstanding products and provide even higher value through 2020. We don’t have any plans on resting.