# An outline for _Interbolt Inc._

## Problem/market gap
B2B software solutions for corporate/employee feedback loops do a poor job of assuring employees that there are no negative consequences for excessive honesty or a lack of professionalism when providing feedback. Employees remain rightfully skeptical when filling out a feedback forms, questionnaires, or surveys provided to them by a higher up at their company. This is a form of information corruption and hinders the company's ability to retain quality employees.

## The solution
Build a new system through a mixture of human processes and low tech software solutions that a network of consultants can utilize to improve feedback cycles within companies. Our consultants provide a layer of protection for employees, ensuring no one is punished for their honesty.

## The business model
Initially, all revenue comes from companies hiring myself and one or two others to implement this system for companies. Eventually, we expose the system to new consultants that we hire and train, taking a cut of their hourly pay.

## Why does the market gap exist?
Corporate software sales funnels typically focus on winning over the ones that write the checks, aka managers or execs. So the softwares that most satisfy the desire of those in power tend to gain market significance.

## Isn't this a saturated market?
At first glance, yes. The list of feedback tools are endless, and even anonymous feedback tools are plentiful. The catch with all of them is that even if anonymity is built in to their feedback system, it is still possible to for an overly "colorful" employee to reveal themselves if they are not careful with their words. This leads to self-censoring. Interbolt ensures that only an **interpretation** of the feedback ever makes it back to higher ups in the company.

## Are there any companies already doing this successfully?
Yes, they are fairly niche but there is a precedent for this service.

## How do you prevent compromising on employee protection principles?
We start the company with a sales funnel that primarily focuses on employees. In the short term such a funnel is less profitable since employees are more passive when it comes to championing the use of a new service internally. If we can become efficient at this process, despite its short term downsides, and sell based on employee preference, we are incentivized to build things in a less compromising way. Power has shifted in the labor market and I believe now is the time to build employee focused sales funnels. We can still sell to execs when possible, but we must never compromise and accept that some deals will fall through as a result. Eventually, if the system demonstrates value to higher ups in a few companies then a more profitable referral-based sales funnel could form. Referrers could communicate the value of not compromising on employee trust.

## Is it healthy to allow employees to lack professionalism when providing feedback?
In it's current form, no. Employees are people and people are imperfect. Unprofessional feedback can create toxicity if the feedback is too harsh. If I call my manager a "piece of shit" and other employees, as well as my manager, catch wind of the feedback it could create division, leading to a drop in team efficiency as a result. Overly harsh feedback still contains some kind of value, but it is greatly outweighed by it's cost to company culture.

## How can we address the cost of harsh feedback?
We build a process that focuses on providing anonymity guarantees to employees. We design our business contracts to restrict the release of any information on demand, we use basic encryption to prevent any dishonest behavior by corporate network admins, and we focus on UX and education to reassure employees that they are protected in the feedback cycle.

## Assuming the cost is addressed, what is the value?
Employee retention and satisfaction. Providing a safe space for employees to vent, suggest controversial ideas, make personal critiques, etc makes the employees feel heard and gives them a a greater sense of agency. Our job is not to validate unprofessionalism, but to provide an outlet for it. Managers and execs benefit from more useful insights.

## How do we deal with inarticulate, low value responses?
The most naive implementation of this product is where a survey gets created, responses are filled out, and we analyze the results right away for use by corporate leaders. This is not terribly useful unless all employees buy in and provide lengthy feedback on the first response. The analysis would essentially amount to "hey, you're employees are [unhappy or happy]". While not entirely useless, it's probably not useful enough to justify the existence of a company.

## Without having to write ungodly complex software, how do we build a useful process?
After initial responses are gathered we re-engage employees whose responses aren't immediately useful. Our role, initially, will look less like a software service, and more like a classic consultant or HR service. We assign a single consultant to a company who we'll refer to as that company's "interpreter". The process would go as follows:
* Manager or exec drafts up a survey and specifies who the respondents are. They list a set of objectives for the survey so we know how to frame the results.
* We generate a new private email account for each respondent to use anytime they interact with the assigned interpreter
* Respondents receive an onboarding email with the following info: a link to create their their account and who to send their survey responses to.
* We'll make some minor white label mods to an existing open source email client
* The assigned interpreter then engages with the employee emails that trickle in.
* So if some employee says, "Jim is a jerk", our interpreter will respond with follow up questions from that private email address
* Our job is to identify common templates that an interpreter can use and modify to extract more useful information from via follow up emails
* Once an interpreter is satisfied with the number of responses, the depth of engagement, and feels able to make a detailed but anonymized report for the manager, all respondents will be notified that the window for responses has closed.
* We will then remove all email trails but store the raw data from the survey on our own encrypted db, ensuring that no unnecessary info leaks happen. Retention of this data is important to develop a moat.
* Our interpreter will work within InterBolt to build a useful report for the manager.
* Upon submission all employees and managers involved will receive the results.
* All survey participants (survey creators too) will receive a follow up email asking them to rate the quality of our work. This gets used for our internal purposes only.

## What is the timeline
* 12-18 months, we stick to the low tech email-based process to maintain focus on the domain model, rather than coding.
* 1.5 years - 3 years, we build out robust software that we start to expose to a broader network of consultants, hired by InterBolt
* 3-5 years, we build a software that is fully self-service that a company can use if they don't "trust" our network of consultants.

## What is the sales cycle on day 1
* Identify a single industry, probably tech makes the most sense, that incurs high training/onboarding costs. These companies have the greatest incentive to buy employee-centric tools or services.
* Create a polished set of resources we can email to potential employees and execs
* One set for execs and a different set for employees, each containing versions of the following:
* **A pdf pamphlet developed by us which outlines the problem and solution**
* **Research material that backs up our pamphlet**
* **Documentation of our service process**
* **Pricing structure, terms, etc (execs only)**
* Create a list of 100 potential clients
* Develop a strategy to engage
* Think cold calling, conference networking, email outreach, paid marketing
* Try not to succumb to "Just send me your info, I'm busy" but if you have to you should have a set of resources designed literally just for the "skeptic", aka more to the point, dialed down tone, etc.