Developing a cloud startup: marketing, development and plans

I was inspired to write this post by Megamind in offering free subscriptions to startups who are ready to talk about the development of their project, share successes and packagings, and also have a direct dialogue with Megamy people. Well, although we already have a subscription to our company, we also consider it not superfluous to talk about our work. Below in the text, I will describe who we are, what we did in April on the project and what we plan to do in May.

Who are we?

Since June 2014, we have been developing a virtual PBX for RingCloud business . In August, we conducted a beta test of the product, in which more than 300 testers took part (here you can read more about this) , in October we started selling the service to the first users, simultaneously improving the product based on their responses, and in February of this year we went to full production fully armed.

Post I will break into five parts:

• Development of new functionality
• Improving and catching bugs
• Sales
• Marketing
• Plans for may

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Go!

Development of new functionality

Docking with skype

The very idea of ​​implementing these connections is not new. Everyone knows about the possibilities of receiving Skype calls using SIP protocol and landing MegaFon SIP numbers for a long time, there is a lot of documentation, but not all of them correspond to reality for some reason. For example, when we connected Skype Connect, we noticed some nuances in the SIP protocol operation, namely, not quite standard transmission of From headers, caller ID numbers were not standardized in them, also this connection method has some delays during incoming calls, that their technical support promises to fix it. According to the result, we have that our customers can easily integrate Skype into our virtual PBX.

Docking with megaphone Multiphone

With the multi-phone, in particular, there were no problems except some inconsistency of their official documentation with reality, so we made our documentation by testing all the functionality and describing it in detail.
We slightly improved our external number connection management interface by adding call forwarding management on the provider's side to our personal account, now in order to enable incoming calls to be redirected to a SIP connection or vice versa, our users do not need to write HTTP requests to send SMS or call those support Megafon, all this can be done in our personal account.

REST API

In March, we very often heard from various users the question of the possibility of integration with CRM systems. We also received interesting suggestions on using RingCloud in conjunction with other products. For all this, we needed to provide our users with their own REST API. No sooner said than done. In April, this task hit our project manager and its implementation began. Already, we have a ready-made list of functions that we will give to users, and they, in turn, based on them, will be able to do any integration. In terms of API visualization, we decided to use Sphinx . On April 24, I accept the task from the developers, and in early May we will lay out the API in public.

Improving and catching bugs

Facilitate the registration of a legal entity

Once again, going through all the stages of registration and use of the system, testers proposed to simplify the procedure for entering details for legal entities (LLC, JSC).

In the process of development, the billing requirements for the mandatory presence of fields to fill out the details migrated to the project. In fact, for the registration of the sale of numbers, the presence of crossed-out data is not necessary. And when filling out, not every user had on hand the data of the OKVED of his enterprise. Now these data are not required and do not create inconvenience for users to work.

Voice mail bug

Voicemail is activated by switching the toggle switch. Everything would be fine, but at some iteration of the product, we flew the function of saving changes. That is, after switching and exiting the settings section, they were not saved. Since voice mail is not the most popular option, we also found it thanks to testers, not customer complaints. Found and corrected.

Sales and user interaction

Long awaited trial period

Since February, we tested a business model that allowed access to the service only after paying for the first month of the selected tariff. In fact, the results of registrations and payments were quite satisfactory. Only here we have not developed a product for a satisfactory level. In parallel with the users who paid and used, we had a growing funnel of potential users who expressed doubts not about us personally, namely, whether a virtual PBX and / or they can cope with its configuration even with our help. It was for them in April that the option of a free trial period of 10 days became available. Our sales managers reported this to those who registered earlier, and the increase in daily registrations was more than 60%.

Marketing

Article Content Placements

Until this month, we worked only on pay traffic. Our first attempts at writing articles for such portals as Shopologist , e-pepper , Habr and Megamind gave a noticeable increase in registrations and purchases. We also received cool reviews on our product. Some of the comments / suggestions are taken to work. We will continue. For those who are just going to work in this area, I want to advise to distribute a small media plan for 1-2 months for publications. First, think about the topics and who in the team can write. It is so much easier to decide whether to start working or not.

TV series translations (sponsorship)

It is very difficult to record direct metrics through this channel, but the growth of direct transitions indicates that interest in the product increases on the day of the release of the series of various TV series. It is safe to say (and this confirms the bounce rate) that people do not just come to gaze at the site from advertising.

Plans for may

Landing, Landing, Landing

In May, we will spend a lot of time testing various marketing theories. We have a lot of grounding on the landing pages. It is necessary to understand which ideas the market will perceive correctly, and which we mistakenly believe to be correct. In any case, our designer Alexandra, who joined us this month, will help us.

Test new trends in contextual advertising

Everyone understands that normal guys have more than 10 advertising campaigns with different goals and messages. We are constantly brainstorming to find unused niches. Now we have 2-3 ideas, which we will check. If everything is ok, then at the end of May I will tell about it in more detail.

Test the location of rates to compare the number of registrations

I read a lot about it. What. let's try :) Although there are parallel opinions from the series that the color of the “Buy” button is not pretty, but if you sell a crap, no one will ever buy it.

Launch of two internal projects: Mars and Jupiter

Here is the hottest secret secret. We have worked on two internal projects that will be ready by August of this year. It will be a BOMB! In May we start writing code and design. Everything within RingCloud, of course, but with a serious expansion of the horizon of services. You'll like it. No one has done this yet!

Sorry for longrid, if someone has strained, but this is just a hard-nosed version of everything that was done in RingCloud within a month. Below is a small survey that will help me understand what is interesting more.

Thanks for attention!