Appreciating the Bold and the Basic
It’s been a huge last couple of months for us here at Bluetail. With every day that passes, we’re inching closer and closer to our official launch date— a milestone that our whole team has been dedicated to achieving since day one.
Throughout this process, as we were building our product, we knew that we wanted to make this something better, easily accessible, and exponentially helpful. As we made our way through the product building process, we had spoken to pilots and fleet owners about the things they cared about most. We began leaning heavily on their feedback, and using it to build a new, paperless aircraft records system that could easily be updated with uploads and scans of owners’ own paper records.
While we continued having these discussions with potential customers throughout the process, one key thing was missing— black and white validation from our future customers that this big idea of ours was actually something they needed, and more, something they’d be willing to use month after month.
The ultimate question popped relentlessly into our heads: Do we need to build something much more complex?
So, to get a little closer to our launch goal, we decided to put out an online survey to jet owners, operators and pilots … exactly the types of people we’d be partnering with every single day. The ultimate goal? To formalize our understanding of which products and services our future customers would truly get on board with and find big value in. And honestly— the results left us more excited than ever!
When asked what features potential customers would actually find to be the most valuable, the number one answer was to “safely scan, upload and organize all of my aircraft paper logbooks.” The second most popular response? “Easily find flight, maintenance and other documents on a single platform, from any device.”
While none of these may seem very exciting at first glance, for us, the results meant something incredibly important— that our original hunches were correct, and that we had, indeed, built our product in the right direction.
Of course, we had been having customer development conversations all along, and our own product development team had spent a lot of time and effort building a sophisticated, modern-day document management system. But when all was said and done, we realized that any second guessing we had given our ideas were misplaced— and the ultimate value we deliver, though basic, was validated in a huge way.
As the clock counts down to our official launch day, we’ve made even more progress. We’ve signed up our first few customers, all of which have responded favorably, and were a huge learning in themselves. In fact, the sheer volume of documents these pilots and jet owners have shown us (MX entries, supporting documents, manuals, etc.) were, quite frankly, shocking. More importantly, these could have easily been overwhelming without Bluetail.
If our survey results and initial customer feedback are indicative of our future prospects— and we strongly feel that they are— then it’s becoming even more clear that we’re building something that will not only be of tremendous value to the aviation community, but that will tap into a huge market many thought was too simplistic to tackle. So if you haven’t already seen what we offer, check out some of our game-changing services here:
- Aircraft Brokerage Assistance
- Airworthiness Directives and Compliance
- Digital Aircraft Logbooks and ATA Codes
So, will Bluetail continue to evolve, grow, and implement new features? The answer is a resounding yes. But one thing is for sure – we’ll never again lose sight of the fact that sometimes, doing the basics better can not only help an entire industry, but can disrupt it in the best possible way.