Web App: Juvely

I was browsing the blogosphere today when I read an interview with Steve Poland, one of the questions asked: Aren’t you worried about telling the world your start-up idea? After reading his reply, it made me think. What’s the point in keeping Juvely a secret any longer? As said before our idea is already out there, we’re just trying to improve existing solutions.  Luca and I are both extremely passionate about the application. I think it’s time we let you guys know exactly what we’re working on. I’m not going into detail with all the exact features because things could change. [Another blog discussing keeping your ideas secret with links - Luca]

So what is Juvely & why have we built it?

Juvely is a web based help desk application. It’s aimed at small to medium sized businesses. We’re aware that there is strong competition already out there, however, a lot of it is stupidly over priced and badly designed. We’re trying to fill this void, I’ve run hosting companies in the past, for example, a friend and I ran a hosting company – we had near to 100 clients, we tried many help desk solutions although most of them were time consuming and badly designed, and those that we deemed “ok� were way overpriced. We, as students understand that running a business does cost money, although why should you be paying over the odds for applications which really aren’t worth the time of day?  I’ve been working on Juvely for over a year. When I first came up with the concept, I did a lot of research into the market, and concluded that most of these help desks were bloated, hard to use and gave you way too many features (half of which you wouldn’t use anyway – so why pay for them?).

What do we think is important?

I’ll be honest, we don’t have a “final� feature list yet, we are still coming up with possible features, and we evaluate then decide whether they would really beneficial to the user. Following the idea of simple, sexual and smart sums it up nicely. Here is our key feature list so far.

• Dashboard (how original) – Now a day’s many dashboards I see are completely pointless. Our dashboard will give you the information you need to know quickly with no fuss. Navigating away from it to deal with the tasks that matter easily is an important factor for the application.
• Tickets - Clients should be able to submit tickets with ease, making sure they are sent to the right people, and letting them show you how urgent their matter is. How about a simple SMS alert feature as well? A nice clean interface, with all what you need on the same page is what we are aiming for.
• Knowledge base – Being able to construct an informative knowledge base, with ease of use and allowing your clients to get to the information they need quickly is another important factor.
• Live Chat – Similar to other helpdesk solutions, the live chat will connect with a staff member allowing the client to speak directly with who they need to, when they need to. There will be no needless features. (I hate it when I have to go through a 100 different options just to speak to someone).
• Your staff – Having less than two people running a helpdesk can be quite a chore, we want to make this easy.  Adding staff should be simple and to the point. Giving them access to what they need to use will also seamlessly integrate with the rest of the application.

What now?
That’s about as much as can be said at the moment, we still have features to think about. Another thing to mention is we will ALWAYS be open to suggestions and feedback from our customers. As we see it, at the end of the day, you’re paying for the service we are providing, why shouldn’t we listen to you and implement the features you want?

Over the last few months we have been hard at work moving towards the first version, we hope to have a beta version out by the summer, and then get onto building a business. We aren’t yet sure of all the details but we will let you know in due course. Don’t worry though, we aren’t planning to make a quick sell out, we are in it for the long haul.

Now you know what the app does, if you are interested you might want to sign up to the beta, when we go live, we’ll let you know asap!