Keen IO, a startup with a cloud service for data analytics, has been having technical troubles this month, including delays for database queries and even a brief period when data was lost. Rather than brush off the issues, engineers at the startup will open up to questions from all directions in a sort of Ask Me Anything (AMA) discussion.
The conversation starts tomorrow at 10 a.m. Pacific on Keen’s Google Group, inside the thread AMA: Platform Stability (LIVE).
“We thought about a couple of different places and ultimately we thought our Google Group would be best,” Josh Dzielak, one of the startup’s first employees, told VentureBeat in an interview.
It’s a bold move, because angry customers could pile on and build a mountain of complaints. But it’s one that could make programmers and marketers more confident about the Keen product, as well as the team behind it.
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As for the AMA concept, it’s a fairly novel way to allay concerns lurking among a company’s customers. If nothing else, the model gets attention for its originality.
Doing the public question-and-answer session was the idea of Alexa Meyer, Keen’s director of brand and product marketing. She was inspired by startup Segment, whose team members held an AMA of their own earlier this month on the marketing-oriented website GrowthHackers.
Rather than deal with providing information on private channels like email, she figured it would be better to open up the conversation to the public.
“We don’t have…a scripted story or anything,” Meyer said. “We’re just going to see what kinds of questions come in and our engineers will answer them as honestly as they can.”
Which should make for a colorful conversation tomorrow.
