Building a SaaS Company for 5 Years- Key Lessons Learned

This August, we celebrate the 5th anniversary of launching Omnify 🙏🏻

We started building Omnify to help service-based businesses Sell and Schedule online. Our journey had just started.

Fast forward to Apr 2020- The pandemic accelerated the demand for Omnify, at speed, unlike anything we had ever dreamt of. We enabled more than 1,000+ sports, rec centers, and parks to open up safely during the pandemic. I wrote a thread last year on our growth.

I thought I’d share some of the lessons I learned along the way.

Product Success = Customer Success:

Invest in your customer’s success. Period.

Your product is as good as your customers succeeding with it. A very few product companies have integrated levers that ensure customer’s success within the product. Every product company should aspire to be there at some point in time.

Until then, invest in building a solid customer success team that empowers your customers. This is one investment we did from Day 1. And, now more than a function, it’s our core culture at Omnify.

You need to empower your customers so that they become your biggest advocates. In the last 12 months, we did 35+ customer stories and some really heartwarming video testimonials.

▶️ Omnify’s Video Testimonials

Company cultures are a reflection of their founders:

We honestly did not set out to build a company when we started up. We were two people who loved building products (by the time we launched Omnify, we had built three products 🙈)

As we grew our team, we had our ups and downs. We realized how important it is to set a culture of mutual love, respect, and growth between the company and the team members.

This year, we took proactive steps to nurture the young talents in our team. We teamed up with Kaha Minds to offer Mental Health support, Leadership grooming programs, started Health Insurance for the teammates and their immediate family members through Plum, created a flexible Leave policy, started a Learning Fund, and more.

We’ve been doing Monthly and Quarterly Socials- because we all need some fun as well.

Speaking of fun, did you check out our funny little campaign:

Do the job before you hire for it:

There’s no job that Founders have not done. So, hiring for these gets a bit easier when as a founder, you have donned multiple hats for a long period.

But on the flip side, it makes it harder as well as you have to now let go of the stuff you’ve been doing all your life. You are now a leader, and there are newer challenges. You have to keep learning and growing. Your title remains the same but the job changes.

As we started hiring for multiple roles, we realized the best hires were made in functions we previously managed on our own. For the newer functions, we are still fighting the good fight. We grew from 10 team members to 40 in just 12 months. And, on top of it, like the whole world, we too went completely remote.

We are so proud to have built a young and passionate team of believers. They are the ones who are now helping us dream big. The energy is infectious!

Don’t be afraid of pivots:

When opportunities knock at your door, don’t shy away. Don’t believe you can’t pivot just because you have spent so much time doing things in a certain way. One of the essential qualities of entrepreneurship is the ability to read and respond to market demands accurately.

We did the same last year when Covid-19 hit, and most of our customers had to shut business temporarily. We organized an ‘idea-thon’ where the whole team (at that time 10) came together and pitched ideas that can help our customers. We came up with some solid ideas.

We saw opportunities in markets where we previously did not see a fit, but we were (I was) unsure. My co-founder is the braver one here, and he convinced us to take the plunge. We did a pivot and onboarded 800+ customers in 4 months.

The rest of it is a saga.

Where there is SaaS, there is Churn:

SaaS is a roller-coaster. And retention is the key to everything.

We had a churn problem.

We realized our problem was messaging. We could not communicate to our customers how we can ‘also’ help them beyond their season (a lot of churns happened because of the seasonality of the businesses). The reason we failed was that we tried doing it at scale.

We are now course correcting, and we’ve restructured our Customer Success team. We divided the team into two functions: Customer Support and Account Management. Account Management for a $1,000 ARPU might seem silly. But, what we learned from this exercise is that it created ownership among the Account Managers. And decentralizing the process helped us in our messaging. Now, it is a lot easier to do 1–1 with every customer.

I hope to share more insights on this framework sooner.

What’s next.

We have many interesting new launches in the coming few weeks- one of them is Launching our Mobile App for our customers📱. This will enable admins and trainers to manage everything from the Mobile App- Schedules, Clients, Payments, and more. We also have a shiny new homepage which is due to launch in a week 🤞.

And then there is the plan for the next five years. I am not a very big picture person. But, we have discussed some exciting ideas, my co-founder will share all these in a post (hopefully).

It’s been a 5-year journey, and most of our growth has happened only in the past year. Honestly, it took longer than expected for our company to hit growth. But every company, like every human being, has its unique journeys.

Here’s ours- Happy 5th Omnify! 💚