Since both Tout and Braintrust are in their infant stages, I like to get in touch and personally talk to most new customers who sign up for one of the services.

I wanted to share with you my process for doing this, since it has been working out reasonably well for me.

* I set up a template in Tout) called “New Customer Signups.” Here is what it looks like:

**Subject:** Greetings from Braintrust

First of all, thank you for signing up for Braintrust. It is a new service and we’re really excited about it.

I wanted to reach out to you personally to see how everything is going with your new team Braintrust.

Since we’re constantly looking to improve our service, any feedback would be immensely helpful as well.

There are two ways you can give us your insights, you can either fill out this brief 8-question survey: http://survey.io/survey/a6db6 (it usually takes about 4 minutes to complete) or you can just hit ‘reply’ and write out your thoughts over e-mail.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

Cheers,

TK

Founder and CEO of http://braintrust.io

* I don’t like to blindly send out these emails to every new customer. So, I set up a little link in my admin console so that for every new customer, I get a special link to Tout with the name and email pre-filled in.

It looks something like “http://toutapp.com/pitches/new?name=TK&email=tk@email.com”

* Based on the stats from Tout, I’ve had a reasonable amount of success. I’ve already tweaked my message a bit, and I’m sure I’ll be tweaking it more, but having the ability to track these emails and the stats around them has been immensely helpful.

Being able to keep track of these kind of emails for customer development has been hugely helpful. Both in terms of delivering a consistent message but also in terms of having actual stats so that I can iterate over the message.

Tout is a simple web-based application that helps you templatize and analyze your business emails.

Braintrust is a web-based private social network and discussion forum that helps organize your team’s conversations.