0 – 100 customers! How fast can your SaaS startup accelerate?

The toughest challenge in your startup journey is getting to the milestone of first 100 customers. iSPIRT’s 97th PlayBook RoundTable, ‘Zero to One’ was held last Saturday in the hot and humid city of Chennai.

Ankit Oberoi from AdPushUp moderated the RoundTable which was attended by 13 other startup founders eager to know how to crack this. The PlayBook didn’t have formal presentations but rather involved everyone into an engaging conversation that was both informal as well as informative.

First things first, as early stage SaaS startups, “Kneel down and build your product well, when bootstrapped” was Ankit’s advice.

Identifying Target Customers

Emphasis was made on identifying your target customers to help you build the right inbound and outbound strategies. Ankit mentioned that a good way to find your target customer type is to look at your top ten customers. Few entrepreneurs looking to generate quick revenue might tend to drift towards a service model.

Arvind Parthiban, CEO of Zarget had an insight on this trend — “Going the service way will work only if one can scale up right and maintain profitability in the longer run”.

Inbound Marketing Tactics

A majority of the discussion was about inbound procedures. 3 simple things should make up your Content Marketing strategy –

Identifying your target persona
Creating quality content
Setting up distribution channels

Just creating content will not cut it! You need to market it right to do justice to its quality.

Though it is a painfully long process, bootstrapped startups have the luxury of time and they should invest in building on content strategies around long tail keywords. Much emphasis was given as to why content should be created for personas. An example that was pointed out for this was Groove’s blog where the focus is exclusively on founders.

It is right for early-stage startups to focus on generating traffic through content but the real focus should be on giving value to the readers. Conversions can happen even later and not necessarily while reading your content. Growing a subscription list through your blog is not only a no-brainer, but a must have item in your growth stack .

Ankit stressed on how Neil Patel talks about why you need to urge your readers to subscribe right from the start. When you have a subscribers list, you can nurture them to share your content and build a bigger subscribers list which will ultimately increase your brand value and improve your customer base. Initial days of your startup journey are when you can do such things that take time to scale.

Intent Defines Inbound

Categorize your efforts based on intent when you are going all out on inbound marketing. Content writing has to be segregated widely into two types –

Buyer Intent
Value Intent

Buyer intent content are the ones written with the focus on ranking higher on search engines. These should have focus on keywords and the main objective of these content pieces are to sell your product.

Value intent is when you become a Thought Leader of the industry you are in. Helping your customer persona should be the name of the game when you generate such content. At times, you don’t even have to put a link back to your product when you write such content. Educative long form content with simple writing works best.

Just like content writing, content distribution too has to be categorized based on intent.

SEO intent — You share the article/blog with search engine ranking in mind
Sharing intent — You find avenues where people are bound to share the post more
Distribution intent — Sharing in one place that sets off a chain of shares

Be spot on with your content!

Creating a content calendar is a must! Knowledge sharing on this topic pointed out that the calendar should be finalized, ideally, in the first few days of the month. Decide on buyer intent topics with the help of keyword planners. Thought leader articles can be written with the help of community platforms — find answers for the most-asked questions. Quora is a gold mine to search for blog ideas.

The consensus from the more experienced entrepreneurs at the RoundTable was that content has to be tested too. The headline is the most important bit of your article/blog. Ankit spoke about how 75% of your readers don’t actually read your content but rather scan for information. He shared a personal insight on how just a headline change helped AdPushUp make an article go viral overnight! Check out this article here.

As much as headlines, the first few lines matter too! In fact, most people who share an article actually read the intro and then skim through the article. Sharing happens not because people read it fully but because they feel it is relatable to something they would read and want to express to their circles about the type of content they would read. Your formatting should be spot on to help them digest your post in just a few seconds!

Headlines need to be tested extensively. Vengat from Klenty stressed on how testing one variable at a time is imperative for success. Ankit talked about how he narrows it down from a couple dozen headlines for their blogs. A/B test between the best ones to ensure you get the best variation.

Types of articles to try…

The Zero to One #PlayBookRT stressed on a few interesting article types startups should try –

Summarizing Comprehensive Blogs — Found something useful? Write a brief, original summary of the blog. This will rank organically. Ensure author credits are given.
Roundups — Take a pick of useful tips, quotes, tools etc., and do a roundup. Reach out to the people/products/companies you mentioned and they will share it to their followers
Skyscraper Technique — Find an awesome content and piggyback on it. Find linkable assets, make it better by adding in your thoughts or collating ideas. Reach out to the authors of the post and share it on social media.

While on the topic of Content Marketing, the topic of paid promotions came into play and it was agreed upon that paid promotion for articles should be done with the intent only to hit a critical mass. With paid promotions, readership is not improved but only the views are artificially increased. A good insight from one of the attendees was to try and push notifications about blogs through live chat platforms like Intercom.

Hiring your inbound team

There are two types of talent you need on your inbound team for achieving success in your content marketing endeavours. The hustlers & the experts. Hustlers are those who understand the market and the distribution channels while the experts should be the ones strong in content.

AIESEC is one hiring venue that you should consider for smart and affordable talent.

You need to break down your web analytics — group traffic sources and optimize for each and every source. Ankit explained how Google not only ranks posts but also pulls down posts with the help of Ryan Fishkin’s social experiment. He urged people to open a top ranked post and immediately go back to the search results page. The search engine bots picked this up and realized people no longer find the post valuable and dropped it by one position!

We live in a smart world! And to outsmart Search Engines, you need smarter content tactics.

Quick look at a few other learnings

Arvind and Ankit then shared their experiences with events generating brand value and how that indirectly helps your inbound conversions.
PR is yet another way of getting social approval. It reduces sales cycle as well as helps with search engine rankings.
Vengat shared his learnings from Prodpad’s gamification for trial users that kept urging for additional actions for trial extension. This would inevitably lead to more activation.
There was a brief session on PPC campaign optimization and how Google’s Quality Score is important

Out-take on Outbound

Ankit stressed on the fact that if a startup concentrates well on inbound tactics and is all set for the long run, outbound becomes considerably easier. Most US companies go all out on inbound tactics. Being in India, we have the luxury to work on outbound marketing at relatively cheap costs.

Tools like BuiltWith, Datanyze, SimilarWeb are in this space. The problem to be addressed would be scaling the process without expanding the existing team. As you reach out to more and more people, the data bulk can be huge to handle if you don’t automate/semi-automate the process.

An entrepreneur’s journey is one to be cherished and the initial acceleration from 0–100 customers is enjoyable though dotted with challenges. The 97th Product Nation PlayBook RoundTable turned out to be a learning experience for everyone who attended and hope this article threw light on what was discussed to those who weren’t lucky enough to be part of it.

Never miss an iSPIRT event again — stay tuned to this page for updates on upcoming Product Nation events. Guest blog post by Kingston David, Zarget

12/11/201615/11/2016

The specifics – How we grew 100% organically every quarter

We had earlier written about the fundamentals that helped us in growing over past one year but recently we looked back to dig further and list down few specifics that we believe helped our growth. These come from our own experience as a consumer company and might not be applicable to every startup but we hope that something applicable and actionable is derived from the points below.

What we did:

1) We operated below scale in a very patient manner (Do things that don’t scale — Paul Graham)

Early on, we saved contacts of all our top 300 active users in a company phone and spent a great deal of time in assisting them, reaching out to them. We called them all at least once a month, interacted over WhatsApp and staying tuned to their feedback helped us iterate our product at a faster pace. These users were also the ones whose feedback we gave primary weightage to. The idea was that it’s better to have few hundred very satisfied users than few thousand dissatisfied users.

This further helped us in a subjective product validation as we monitored NPS (Net Promoter Score) and gauged how disappointed they will be, if we took the product away from market.

2) Almost everyone in our team did customer support early on.

Over a period of time, many customers thought that we had a big team of customer support staff while the reality was that anyone would pick up the phone kept on the table in the early days. Reason for this was that, we wanted to listen to every piece of feedback ourselves and understand the issues users faced. The same set of issues and appropriate actions to be taken differed in many instances when viewed from different perspectives of development team, marketing team and product team.

The idea was that we need to have high capacity of attentiveness. We would respond to every tweet, call, email and resolve any issue within 10 minutes. This further reflected in our play store reviews where a vast number of them praise our customer support.

This non-scalable approach is an advantage of being a first mover in the market, the tacit knowledge acquired is invaluable and sets up time compression diseconomies (an MBA jargon for first mover economic advantage) that just can’t be overcome overnight by a clone.

3) We sold like a non-tech company!

Remember those users whom we had on our WhatsApp, we cross-sell and up-sell a lot of different use cases to them by just picking up the phone, so much so that they started recognising us by our voice over phone. We did a user specific profiling of their spend and the use cases they spent on and carried out over quarters weekly and monthly comparative analysis to predict growth trajectory and fine tune our throttle accordingly.

We were obviously not selling penny stocks but genuinely helping them out!These users further spread the word about product among their peers and we started mapping behaviour of incoming cohorts of users.

4) We iterated very fast for a focussed outcome

We have very short product release cycles to experiment and test our hypotheses and improve funnels conversion and KPIs. As a small startup, we realised that at any point of time, there are maximum of 2 metrics that we can focus on.

This ensured that we learnt and acquired knowledge of our social payments domain on a regular weekly basis and this growth is the kind that doesn’t reflect in vanity metrics like app downloads.

5) We maintained sanity when it came to data

We tracked but never over — analysed data. We largely relied on user observation and subjective feedback in early days and later ensured that the assumptions we test are based on decent sized cohorts which are statistically significant. For user observation and feedback, 10–15 users at a time is usually a good number to uncover majority of issues or problems a user would encounter.

6) We started with a clean slate with no prior bias.

We believe that there is nothing ‘standard’ about standards or best practices which is why we put out the disclaimer upfront that our learnings might not be relevant and applicable to all. For a unique product play and especially if you are not copying a product from the West, one requires patience and has to test everything about the product.

We iterated our product with constant user feedback and observation improving the conversions within the product and engagement.

We also got some validation for our approach towards very unique challenges we faced. One such example was partitioning our app in two parts — ‘Split n Settle — Post Transaction money settlement among friends’ and ‘Plan n Pay — Pre Transaction collection among friends’ and the approaches we took were also seen in products whose UX we admire like ClearTrip, Tinder and Google Play.

We have just begun and are learning something new everyday. It is this process of never ending learning from consumers while serving them, that excites and keeps us going on every day.

Guest Post by Ankit, MyPoolin

Content Marketing for early stage startups – iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable

Playbook-RoundTable is one of the most sought after community events of iSPIRT. It’s a gathering of 12 like-minded product startups who are beyond the early stage. RoundTables are facilitated by an iSPIRT maven who is an accomplished practitioner of that Round-Table theme.

The Playbook Roundtable (#PlaybookRT) on content marketing is a brainstorming session on how to acquire users at scale and confer them to customers without paying a dimethrough content marketing. The playbook roundtable is facilitated by Ankit Oberoi, Co-CEO AdPushup(an ad layout optimization platform that helps web publishers drive more revenue from their existing website ads)

The session will include:

Building the Inbound Company Culture
- Psychology behind Inbound and why it works
Understanding and creating Personas
Creating the right content
Distribution to reach your audience
Content measurement and analytics
SEM – Using a combination of content and paid
- Overview of AdWords
- Hacks to improve keyword quality score
- Case Studies

Expectations from participants:

Basic understanding of inbound marketing
Should have used WordPress or any other CMS
Basic knowledge of search engines and SEO

Ideal participants will be founders/marketers, who are working in startups where:

the business is focused on targeting SMEs.
the founder/organization is about to or is already investing some resources in content/inbound marketing

If you are interested in attending the Playbook, please apply here

27/01/201527/01/2015

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.

28/11/201315/08/2014

A Cloud telephony startup, VoiceTree- “Bootstrapped”, “Profitable”, “Still growing”

Indian economy is a cluster of more than 30 million small and medium businesses along with large enterprises which are lesser in number. Majorly, these SME’s powers the growth of Indian business industry.

This large SME pool presents a lucrative opportunity for Indian product and service companies only if one is able to tap it.

One such company which is creating a presence among Indian SME domain is “VoiceTree”. The cloud telephony startup, offers business call management solution with an Integrated IVR under its flagship product MyOperator and an automated order confirmation system on the cloud facility through its initial product, CODAC.

Breakthrough

The startup was founded in 2010, though it was only in this March that things took a major turn for the company, in a positive way.It was the launch of MyOperator, which subsequently became its most selling product.The product helped the cloud telephony startup, to scale up to more than 300 customers from 10 in a period of less than 8 months.

With MyOperator, VoiceTree targeted the large SME sector, mostly businesses which have an offline presence, though it also found a niche segment in the ecommerce industry.

In fact, the customers of MyOperator hails from various industry verticals, be it offline businesses like Berger Paints, political party like Aam Aadmi Party, religious groups such as Art of Living or ecommerce stores like Flaberry.

Other product by the startup, CODAC, targets enterprise sector and bags Snapdeal.com, Lenskart.com and many other as its clients.

Where MyOperator is a call management and tracking system on the top of an IVR, CODAC is more of an order confirmation system on the cloud.

Bootstrapped and Profitable

Though various other cloud telephony players existed in the market before VoiceTree, still the Delhi based startup was able to strengthen its position, now turning profitable with a team of more than 40.

“Effective marketing and customer acquisition strategy has a played a big role for us”, says Ankit Jain, Founder, VoiceTree.

Though our price is on a higher side in comparison to our competitors, but enhanced product features and the product design which suited the Indian SME’s has been the key factor for our whatsoever success so far. Small and medium businesses in India are not so much comfortable with Internet and concepts of cloud or SaaS, they just know about their business. We designed the product for them, with features they can easily grasp, while they focused on their business and daily routines, adds Jain.

The future of the startup looks bright as now it plans to go global and launch more features in its existing product, MyOperator. Also there are more products which are in the development stage which once launched, will help the company to expand its offerings for more business verticals.

Though journey so far has been very exciting and we did it while bootstrapping but now its time when we are looking to raise some capital for executing our more ambitious and larger goals, signs off Ankit.