BlueKiwi lets companies build a community for free

BlueKiwi, a French startup that helps companies manage customer conversations, says it’s starting a big push into the US market. As part of that effort, it’s announcing new pricing that could be hard to resist — companies can build a BlueKiwi-powered community for free.

The company’s tools center around managing customer forums, and finding ideas within them. That sounds like something a lot of other companies including are doing, but Vice President of Marketing Erica Lee said BlueKiwi’s strong point lies in not just creating forums, but also helping companies “take those specific conversations and put them into a process.” In other words, ideas don’t just sit in a forum, and they don’t just pile up uselessly after customers submit them. Instead, BlueKiwi helps companies identify which ideas are getting the most attention from users, then puts them into an “ideation process” where ideas can be discussed, implemented if they’re good, then reported back to the community.

Lee describes the new, free version as a way for businesses to give BlueKiwi a try — if you want to create more than one external community, you’ll have to starting paying $699 a month, or even more for the enterprise version. Still, for some small businesses and nonprofits, the free version may be enough. Other new features include the ability to embed BlueKiwi communities directly on a company website, and to synchronize them with your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts.

BlueKiwi already has 200 customers totaling around 100,000 users, Lee said. It has raised $10.3 million from Sofinnova Partners and Dassault Systems. Competitors include Jive Software and Salesforce.com.