How I closed my first customer
A lot of people have asked me “You being from Mechatronics background how did you learn programming?”. I always told them “I googled and learnt what I needed to learn.” But its not the full story. Here it goes: I had a goal that I was passionate about, I really wanted to build this cool task management app with easy UX flow. (Though now its much more than just Task management)
I had just left being an embedded system’s engineer with no knowledge of how http works, what html and css were.
First touch point, learning what programming was all about
Having experience with VB based Winforms app I started with C# and Winforms. Devloped a GUI by simply dragging components and adding them to Forms. Went on to make a server — client application, to my surprise it worked great. Being naive I approached a big construction company and asked them to try it out ( mind you it was just a small winforms task management app at that time ). As Steve Jobs once said it doesn’t hurt to ask, luckily the owner asked his IT person to have a look.
It goes down hill
I was elated! such a big company asking for a demo. Being gung ho about the demo, demonstrated the app to the IT head. He was impressed and was ready to run the demo for his internal team. However, wanted me to come up with a solution for their remote teams. The app wasn’t made to serve data over the internet it was meant for LAN based communication. I tried running data through the internet and it was too slow. I went back to the drawing board by this time interest from the company had died down.
The wrong turn
Meanwhile I started researching online and found a few good task management applications and figured cloud was the way to go. During 2015–2016 front end tools weren’t as prevalent as they are today. MVC led when it came to Indian web development environment. Since I didn’t know anything about HTML, CSS and being comfortable with C# I started with MVC. Developed small programs, learnt CSHTML, SQL and little bit of CSS.
After developing a prototype MVC app I realized it didn’t compare to the tools available in the market, it was way to slow and bandwidth heavy. (One of the most appealing feature I wanted to have was auto save like Google Docs and Sheets) Soon I found out about Angularjs and React. React seemed way too difficult while Angularjs was easy and simple.
Its all about persistence
With Angular I soon had a working prototype. However, it was difficult for a few months with no sales experience. I taught myself little bit about sales, sourcing prospects through online sources like Linkedin, Zaubacorp, Fundoodata, etc. It was fun yet a little depressing with no leads in the pipeline.
Given the boom in solar industry I found a director who wanted to have a software for managing 100+ of his ongoing projects. He helped me develop the solar project template that I boast about today. This was my first big break but I soon realized the app had a few bugs which had to be worked out. The person was fine with this. However, fate had different plans, there was some falling off with his investors and the director left the company leaving the implementation high and dry.
With no clients, people didn’t have trust in a new entrant. They always asked “ketla loko use kare che?” (how many organizations currently utilize the product?) I had no answers to the question and failed to build trust. However, one good thing that happened was I now had a solar template to market with. I went to a few solar companies in Ahmedabad and pitched the product.
Luck strikes
Luckily a leading solar company was ready to give SmartTask a try. Though he had apprehensions about the company and its future. After assuaging his fears for a while, he finally agreed. SmartTask is indebted to this early adopter for all his feedback and support.
That is how SmartTask cracked its first client, folks.
All in all it was all about marginal adjustments.
I help teams to be more productive than ever before with www.smarttask.io . Its all about having clarity on communication, accountability and responsibility.
