You Launched Your Startup! Great! Now What?

Choosing The Right Path For Your Idea

“The Salesforce of Mobile CRM” — we’d made our grand entrance via TechCrunch and were having our moment of glory at this important milestone.

We knew we couldn’t relax, though. An idea only becomes great with execution (and a healthy dose of luck). So we told ourselves that things were now going to move very fast, and we prepared for it to do just that.

We were right to do so, but we weren’t quite prepared for how lucky we got — the response to our press release was much better than we expected. Three hundred companies were interested in evaluating our product. Companies like Flipboard, News Corp, and Yahoo. What luck! And when you get 300 people interested in your product, you follow up with each and every one of them as soon as you can.

Talk about moving fast, this was pedal to the metal!

One of our most exciting prospects was Kabam. Kabam was a hot gaming company, an amazing score for a startup like us who’d just launched. So how do we get them?

So the three of us are sitting with Kabam and they’re telling us “We love what you’re doing with the mobile customer experience, we haven’t seen anything like it.” And the three of us nod and smile, almost want to wink at each other. We’ve been validated!

“But what about the backend?” Kabam continues. “What about your admin dashboard? What are you doing for agent management features? What about all our web players? What are you doing for the web? What are you doing on Facebook? Do you have a social integration?”

Our smiles faded. We hadn’t built any of this yet.

“If you can build a good dashboard and incorporate web support and social support, then we can talk.”

As we heard this again and again from other companies interested in us, it became clear very quickly that although our product wasn’t there yet, our idea was great. These companies were basically guaranteeing that they would sign with us; all we had to do was build this or that feature for them. Awesome! we thought. This is going to be a lot of work, but at least we’ll have paying customers.

We threw ourselves into these builds with dreams of all the success that work would yield.

But then one day not too long after that, Abinash called us around a table with a serious look on his face.

“This is wrong,” he said. “We have to change our thinking. I’ve seen too many companies fail because they were trying to do too many things too early. We have our own idea of what Helpshift is, but so do all 300 of our potential customers. We can’t build anything and everything for everybody. We’re not equipped for this yet. We’ll collapse under the stress.”

“Okay, well, what do we do then?”

“Mobile is a billion dollar industry. Let’s just worry about mobile. What do you guys think?”

So we limited our target customer to be mobile-first companies only and companies who had an app or were interested in or already in the process of building an app. Kabam would have been a great catch, but we weren’t ready for web support and social support yet. So we shied away from that deal. Instead, we put ourselves in a situation where we were going to be hyper-focused on mobile. We were going to be the King of Mobile. We were not going to do anything else.

With that in mind, Abinash said, “I will create a product that will appeal to mobile users and brands that are trying to go mobile.”

And I said, “I will go find and talk to all mobile brands and find out what they want and feed that information back so we know what to build.”

And BG said, “I will make sure we write code and design the product in a way that is geared towards the market, so that brands will really enjoy using it.”

Because in this industry, ideas are like exotic plants — they only flourish in specific climates. If the climate is even slightly off, the plant withers. We were able to determine the specific climate for our plant. It’s grown because we’ve understood its needs.

If you enjoyed reading this, kindly click the green heart below. Helpshift is well on its way to become the Salesforce of Mobile CRM. As its Head of Business, I’ll be telling the story of Helpshift, from idea to what it is today, in weekly installments. Connect with Helpshift here, or through me on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Apologies for the long break between this and my last post.