How we did IP telephony service: from 0 to 1800 clients in 3 months

I have been working in startups and with startups for a long time. The topic is very close to me, I myself had 5 projects in 4 years with the following statistics: 2 closed, 1 was completely sold to a large company, 1 project was transformed into another. Another one has turned into a small operating business, and also completely changed focus. For two projects attracted quite serious investments. Especially by the standards of the Runet, about ~ $ 0.5 million.

Everyone loves beautiful stories about how a startup has become a “unicorn”, but they say little about what it cost him. That's exactly what my article will be about - a short essay about personal experience with a concrete example of a successful project.

Today I will tell you about Webcall service - a call service for sites with a set of interesting features and opportunities to increase conversions for eCommerce projects. Now there are many such services, but we were among the first.

It was all - and a mistake with the assessment of the market and Central Asia, and with the monetization model, and with the attraction and retention of customers. Then came the problems of a different level - communication with investors, the board of directors, a partner network, foul competition, trademark litigation and intellectual property rights. In general, a complete set of startup charms. Just like in the series “Silicon Valley”.
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At once I would like to make a reservation that I left the project in outsourcing a year and a half ago and do not have much information on what exactly is happening there now. The largest customers remained, and the new CEO changed the focus of the company.

A little bit about the project:

We started a startup as an alternative to popular telephone services - Mango Office, RingCentral and a dozen others. I have long had a team with excellent expertise in telecom projects, IP telephony and the development of high-load services. We have done this project with these guys and are still working on other projects. I, as the CEO and founder of the project, had a great experience in large corporations and an understanding of how exactly everything worked out there, how to sell in the B2B segment, how and what to retain customers.

It seems like everything fits together - there are techies, BizDev is in place, and even the first customers were on a non-existing system. But no. You can not just take and make a successful startup (s).

The first problem is that our first clients were our friends / comrades, the same geeks as we are. We had no idea how to negotiate with unfamiliar or unfamiliar customers.

The second problem encountered is a complex monetization model. The service worked in the B2B2C sector. Like this? Here you need to clearly understand - who uses and who pays. In this model, the one who used did not pay. This was the main difficulty - how to form the right value proposition for the one who pays.

For example, for a long time, Domino`s pizzeria chain was our largest customer. They paid us for the calls of their customers who ordered pizza on dominos.ua. There pizzeria pays, but customers enjoy pizzerias. Mafia came after Domino`s, one of the largest national restaurant chains that sought to develop a home / office food delivery service. They still use the service.

The third problem - the world is moving to the mobile. When we started, it was not so obvious. But immediately after the launch of MVP (the minimum product for which customers are ready to pay), we faced the problem of how to handle requests from mobile devices.

I will not go into the details of all our wanderings and hypothesis testing.

The main thing that we did:

• Tested the main market hypotheses using the TAM / SAM and SOM model
• Decided on the main channels to attract traffic. Primarily with paid scalable channels.
• Could reach self-sufficiency

And after that an investor appeared on the project. I will not say that we were somehow particularly actively looking for an investor in the project. Rather, it was a tribute to fashion ... Nevertheless, thanks to the money of the investor, we got into one of the famous western incubators, trained in the Valley, got the first clients from the USA, etc.

In any case, the question of money is always very acute for any startup. And that's fine. But the problem of 99% of the founders is that there is no understanding - why do you need money? I realized this after the unsuccessful launch of the project. There was an investor, but:

• Not at all Smart. But rather the opposite. From the discharge come 3 months after the start and ask: “Where is the money? Where is the profit? Where is the second Facebook? ”Such investors need to get around the 10th road, but then I did not know it yet.
• To test all the hypotheses and prepare MVP, its own funds and skills are enough. IMHO, in the early stages of the investment more harm than help a startup.

Sales, BizDev and others

In this project, we started selling about half a year before we wrote the first line of code. How? Yes, everything is simple - there are always more complex and / or non-obvious solutions to existing problems. In the end, if the client has a need, then he somehow solves it. The task of a startup is to simplify the solution of a client problem.

We made the most of the existing client PBXs plus a number of our hacks to solve problems and immediately formed such a feature list for the “big” system. In this mode, we worked for six months and earned tens of thousands of dollars. So we understood and tested the hypotheses, how, how much and what customers are ready to pay. This was our main customer development. In more detail about the search model of monetization, I will tell in the following articles.

Affiliate and referral programs

The referral program has become a very important growth criterion. We thought that e-commerce is our main buyers, especially since we already had a number of customers from this niche. And how to sell the product of your target audience? First you need to be at least in the same place where there is Central Asia. Therefore, we decided to take part in one of the largest conferences in RuNet for online stores, we bought sponsorship. At the conference, we got acquainted with a dozen different studios and agencies that themselves offered us to sell our product to their clients, because the product was new and interesting enough at that time, sales through partners went well. When building an affiliate network, I understood a simple rule - no need to be greedy and build all sorts of “muddy” schemes.

What does this mean in practice: a fully transparent system of accounting for customers and their payments - a special affiliate office and a set of unique promotional codes and referral links, automatic payments to a card / checking account, a set of promotional materials for partners, attracting employees to pre-sale for major customers, preparing a full press kit and sales kit. We paid partners a commission of 30% of the amount of the sale and a separate percentage depending on the further income from customers.

Example. One of our partners for the month organized a sale in several major real estate agencies and real estate companies. I earned on this ~ 700 dollars. Paid immediately after the transfer of money from the client to our account. All transactions are instantly displayed in the partner office. No questions arose and the partner ran to sell further.

Everything should be simple and transparent, only then partners will be motivated to sell you.

In general, before participating in the conference, I had a very skeptical attitude towards such events. But after we hit off more than 200 business cards from marketing directors, leading marketing and PR specialists, commercial directors, and other similar audiences, I radically changed my opinion and attitude. Conference for us has become one of the main starting points in terms of sales. If earlier we had clients that we ourselves found and there were few, so to speak, point sales, then after the conference very interesting clients began to come to us - several large logistics companies that had huge call centers, several pawnshop networks, insurance companies and, of course, the usual online shopping.

You can continue this list for a long time. The essence is the same - if it were not for the conference and not a loud statement about ourselves - we would have nothing of the kind. We made a great product on the market that just appeared. Were at the right time in the right place. And this is not luck, but rather a clear planning.

Well, the answer to the main question - how we got those same 1,800 customers in 3 months.

Everything is simple:

• Product quality is paramount.
• The fastest possible iterations when fixing bugs, making changes. The amount of time between receiving feedback, learning and acceptance / non-acceptance should be as short as possible.
• Openness in communication with customers / partners.

In addition to the product, we worked on marketing. We began with the placement of articles in the media. At that time, we were second in the runet and the media eagerly wrote about the novelty, and for free. After the first article, over 2 days received more than 300 clients. About 40% of them are “alive”. At the same time, I received hundreds of requests to the FB on the topic of the service, offers of partnership, etc. The mechanism wound up, a rumor about us went on the market.

The final picture was:

At the end of November, we spoke at the conference, received ~ 200 clients, mostly large ones, after the publication of another 300 articles, simultaneously launched targeted promotion in FB, having received ~ 4000 subscribers over 2 months using various information campaigns and paid promotion of posts.

And then the number of customers began to grow at 30-40% per month. And by March, the number of clients reached 1,800 in Ukraine, the Russian Federation, a dozen EU countries, North America and even in China.

Building first sales is always hard. A startup often, like a blind kitten, goes at random, experiments, falls and rises. The product must be cool, it must be done correctly, you need to plan sales and promote the product, then you can ensure rapid growth.

In conclusion, I would like to say that I left the project. At the very beginning, when there was no project and everything was created from scratch, I was very interested. At some point I was tired of the project. Maybe a burnout occurred, maybe I wanted something new. And to engage in a project that does not bring pleasure is impossible. I decided to sell my share and leave the project.

And so I got into outsourcing, and this outsourcing is the direction of product development, as an external dedicated department. I am currently coordinating the development of several products, both for our internal and external customers. Probably, the essence of a startup in me is not eradicated.

Author:

Jaroslav Naumenko, COO, SECL Group