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3 things I did right: Lesson 3 from a bootstrapped journey of 0 to 8 digit revenue

Last year we received 1.6 lakh pageviews with over 100 articles on improving customer interactions. But the bottom line remains:

As an entrepreneur I play joker. I try – I fall – I stand up again for the next stunt. Whatsoever, I have to keep everyone entertained.

This article is a part of a 3-article series, where I would share 3 most vital lessons as I grew as an entrepreneur, our product grew as an offering and our team grew into a force.

Lesson 1: Don’t hire. Build a team.

Lesson 2: Sell to learn. Learn to sell.

Lesson 3: Karma matters. Stay positive.

Four years journey of Entrepreneurship has probably taught me more than 20 years of education. From the initial days of VoiceTree with not-much-movement to today’s race of “scale, scale and scale” things changed fast. From a small team of 7 to the current team of 70, we learnt why processes are made in any organization. We tackle hiring challenges as we grow and realise the role of maintaining team motivation with time. We address the need of finding more sales channels. But in all this, here’s what consistently counts.

1. Happiness metric

One thing you should always ask your team is, “Are they happy?”. Happiness is the single most important prerequisite for sustainable performance in any organization. If you are not happy you cannot build a worthy product, do a good sale or even provide that great customer support. Karma matters. The way you treat your team is the way your team treats your product and customers.

VoiceTree was a team of 7 people 2 years back, and we still have 6 people out of them. Once we made sure of the happiness with our initial team, it became a part of the company culture and it spread to everyone who joined us. We have people who would not leave the company for appraisals or hike. We have people who would work for multiple days and nights in the row. No amount of money or benefits can improve the performance of an individual, the way happiness metric can.

2. Facilitate initiatives

As a founder, I happily choose myself to be the Chief Happiness Manager. When I feel that the happiness metric is going down, I do a open house session to let everyone speak. Last month I facilitated a game in the office where I asked my team to choose someone amongst them as a CEO for 15 minutes. Rest of the team were supposed to ask questions or share problems with the new CEO. This allowed them to open up and talk more. The best part, however, was that they were  finding solutions by themselves.

Most problems in an organization are due to lack of communication. When you let your team open up and share problems, things get resolved faster than people can imagine. Founders need to communicate their vision, trust and even their problems, openly with their team. Trust your team with transparency and your team will trust you more.

3. Build with positive energy only

You cannot build a great organization with any negative energy. As a founder I always keep myself motivated and positive. There are bad times, tough decisions and even emotionally very low points. But I try not to bring this to my team. As an entrepreneur I play joker. I try – I fall – I stand up again for the next stunt. Whatsoever, I have to keep everyone entertained.

Happiness is something we could have never measured. But eventually it came back to us as our karma with customer reviews, team reviews and an awesome product that we could not have built without an awesome happy team.

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3 things I did right: Lesson 2 from a bootstrapped journey of 0 to 8 digit revenue

We deployed over 1.62 million lines of code to add functionalities and security to the data. But one thing that doesn’t change is this:

As an entrepreneur I play joker. I try – I fall – I stand up again for the next stunt. Whatsoever, I have to keep everyone entertained.

This article is a part of a 3-article series, where I would share 3 most vital lessons as I grew as an entrepreneur, our product grew as an offering and our team grew into a force.

Lesson 1: Don’t hire. Build a team.

Lesson 2: Sell to learn. Learn to sell.

Things you build – Things you sell = Junk

No one will pay for junk. We created a lot of junk during the initial days of VoiceTree, and soon realized that most of our efforts were wasted. At that point we segregated what would sell from everything we had built and concentrated on building MyOperator. We had built a small sales team by then (remember, our hiring funda) and started selling even before we completed building it.

    1. Sell before you build

    Initially we offered product delivery only after 2 months and had a very basic product. Most of you won’t even consider that as a product. It was a single page application covering only the basic need of managing incoming calls on a virtual IVR. But that helped us access what was most important to our customers and we stayed relevant. By the time we released the first version of our product in March’13 we already had 25 paying customers. More amazingly, we acquired another 25 customers within a month of the launch. Our sales team was more than ready by then.

    2. Iterate more initially

    Every team and process needs iteration. When you start selling early you have enough time to make mistakes as well. We changed our CRM twice; we changed the sales pitch 8 time; we let go 2 people and hired 4 more in sales; by the time we had first version of our product. We had even figured out our sweet pricing spot.

    An early sales team meant we had the immediate cash flow needed to hire more people while bootstrapping. More importantly, the initial set of customers gave us good understanding of the problem set in our domain and were building only the relevant features. Moreover, with a funded competitor we could closely understand the problems their customers were facing in product adoption. This led us into smoothing our own product adoption, providing some unique differentiations to our offering.

    3. Product moves parallel to sales

    We took a year selling the initial version of the product, delving deep into customer requirements, and identifying the problem set we should address further on. We have recently launched the next version of our product, MyOperator 2.0,   which has evolved with respect to product usability, user experience and features. We are growing 430% Y-o-Y in a market which has often been described as “not-so-great” by our competitors.

    We are now on the verge of launching MyOperator 2.0 as a global product and we are repeating the same process of selling before properly launching.

Things will go wrong, but what counts is how fast we can make mistakes and learn from them. In startup, speed counts more than you think.

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3 things I did right: Lesson 1 from a bootstrapped journey of 0 to 8 digit revenue

As we closed an amazing year, handling 11.3 million calls, helping customers retain 2.42 million potential leads and getting 10,578 companies to try our product, I would like to submit this:

As an entrepreneur I play joker. I try – I fall – I stand up again for the next stunt. Whatsoever, I have to keep everyone entertained.

This article is a part of a 3-article series, where I would share 3 most vital lessons as I grew as an entrepreneur, our product grew as an offering and our team grew into a force.

Lesson 1: Don’t hire. Build a team.

“Team is the first product any founder should build”. It matters more than the idea itself. A right team will set the right direction even for a not-so-great idea over the course of time. Remember what we learned from Chak De! India. A team does not primarily mean best of skills put together, but an optimal set of people who can perform together to the best of their capabilities. So if your team cannot spend a good time with some person, never bring the person in your team.

1. Build it before you need

Most of my interactions with fellow entrepreneurs end up discussing team building challenges; and this is evident for startups at all stages. That’s mostly because finding great skills with the right attitude gets more difficult when we are not a brand and cannot match the salary.

We at VoiceTree saw this is as major road block from the very early days and thus our hiring never stopped. When you introduce new people to the team, there is a learning period and early attrition. So we were  looking for great people and hiring them irrespective of our immediate requirement. This desire of building a team made us hire an HR manager (recruiter) at a very initial stage and that worked pretty well for us. This brings me to the next point.

2. Get a full time recruiter

Initial months with VoiceTree were extremely difficult as we had little money to hire talent and little experience to run a business.  I was seeking advice from many experienced people and hiring an HR manager was not recommended by most of them. Moreover it was an additional investment that I could have made on someone immediately required. But things changed for good soon and it paid off well.

An HR manager who works on full time hiring can connect to 10X more people and chances of finding better talent at budgeted salary is 3X more. This explains the ROI with respect to any startup. It’s not about how many people you need but about your chances of finding a better fit. An HR manager can ensure a tougher and relevant hiring process to assure quality hiring. Moreover it helps building the culture of the company as an HR manager can take care of day to day management of the team and issue resolutions. It also helps keep sanity by keeping founders away from HR issues.

3. Experiment, even in hiring

Presence of a dedicated HR manager also gave us space to experiment and innovate in our hiring process. Last year we were able to engage 1700+ fresher candidates on our open training portal and hire 20 best sales executives. This training portal was built on our business call recordings on MyOperator, highlighting the application of our own product for training purposes.

Even for hiring experienced candidates we asked them to take that short training from the portal before coming for an Interview. This made the interview more relevant and also filtered out non-serious candidates.

You must experiment in every process of your business; most will fail; but those few that work will define your success.