On building our first SaaS Start-Up
After almost 4 months since the first time we came out with the idea of bulding Callbell, I’d like to share some thoughts on what we have been through in the very early days of our first start-up
It was September 12, 2018 when Gianluca and I found ourselves in a Parisian bar called l‘Abribus to reflect on some ideas we could build together.
I had just returned to Paris from the summer holidays, I had left my full-time job for about a month and, although I was convinced I wanted to start a project, I had no clear ideas about what I could work on during the following months 😰.
Before the summer, I had proposed to Gianluca an idea about a software that could help hotels boost direct bookings, reducing the ones coming from OTAs (that’s where the name Callbell 🔔 was born: despite the pivot, we decided to keep the same brand as it was still ok for the tool we would have built afterwards 💡). ️
During the month of August, Gianluca had started to built a small MVP for our initial idea and in September we were almost ready to start validating the idea.
It is at this point that, by chance, we landed on a Twilio website page that was advertising the recent release of the WhatsApp Business APIs. We quickly realized that we wanted to learn more about it.
Although we had never explored the subject, we both thought how cool it would be for many B2C businesses to be able to connect with their customers via WhatsApp so, shortly after, we forgot about our previous hotels idea (yes, that was fast 😹) and started discussing about something new that would allow companies to easily integrate this channel into their customer service.
That’s the moment where our Callbell ride begins 🛴️.
As many other online businesses everything started by building a landing page and bringing traffic to understand as quickly as possible if the idea we had in mind could have been interesting for our target market. We knew that’s a validation step you need to take before writing the very first line of code so within a week our website was ready to go live for some Facebook Ads.
Meanwhile, we soon realized that only one channel was not enough to build a truly valuable product. That’s why, in addition to WhatsApp, we included the integration with Facebook Messenger, Instagram Direct and Telegram to our initial value proposition.
By the time we started the first campaign, the idea, the website and the ads had been refined and at the 15th of September we were ready to go: we started promoting a platform that would centralize support requests from all major channels based on direct messaging applications plus a website widget to allow visitors to choose which channel they’d like to use to be supported.
I would like to tell you more about why we think there is space for building something relevant in the external communication management landscape but I will leave this topic for a later post.
This was a crucial phase for two main reasons:
- we wanted to start validating the idea, have the first conversations with potential customers and understand what it would take for them to become paying accounts 💳
- get a vague idea about user and customers acquisition cost (as we would have run on a freemium model). From our previous experiences in SaaS, we could assume that every 100 users acquired, in the best case scenario only 5/6 of them would then end up becoming paying customers. It may not sound super exciting, but it’s how this game works 🧐
Here what happened after investing just over 100 euros between Facebook ads and Adroll
We started the first campaign on September 16th and run it until October 7th. Everything on the site was designed as the tool already existed: once you signed up with your email, you’d be able to create an account on Callbell.
Here’s the stats:
- Budget spent: ±110 €
- FB Impressions: 11655 (+ 2576 via retargeting)
- Reach: 4798
- Clicks: 121
- CTR: 1.03%
- Conversions: 15
- Cost x Lead: 7.35€
Despite the relative small size of this first test and being aware that these results may probably not be that significant on a large scale, we were extremely satisfied with what had just happened. After 2 weeks, there were 15 companies out there that wanted to test our product… and that is an amazing feeling 😎
It was even more interesting to discover that those companies belonged to very different verticals: online travel sites, e-commerces, blogs, food delivery start-ups and even a traditional bank 🙄
What’s next?
Well, easy … we tried to talk to all the companies that had signed up, trying to understand what was the real reason for which they had done it (excluding at least it was mere curiosity 😅).
The answers we got are in line with what we already expected: in the B2C space, the ability to reach customers wherever they are and on applications that already use, especially on WhatsApp and Messenger (as well as instantly gather user information after the conversation has started) is seen as a critical advantage over traditional customer support solutions (both ticket management and live chat).
Nowadays you hear a lot about “talking to your potential customers”, “finding product marketing fit” etc etc … but once you find yourself in this phase you soon realize that, despite all the nice Youtube talks, it is not so easy to get relevant information (in addition to confirming that they like the idea and the’d like to test it) without having a real product.
That’s why we started to build our MVP 🔥
While Gianluca was beginning to lay the groundwork for software development, I was “designing” (using UXPin, which I absolutely recommend) what could remotely resemble a clickable mock-up 🤐.
(We promise that, to date, things have improved a lot 🎨.
Time to start thinking “long term” ⌚
After starting to build, we started thinking about what we would have liked to achieve from there to the end of the year. Three months may seem like a few when you work as an employee in a traditional company; but when you start from 0 and you’re all-in on your own project, the long-term concept takes on a totally different meaning 😵
Sunday, October 14th, at the Starbucks you find in front of the Bonne Nouvelle metro station on the Grands Boulevard, we set-up a Trello board and gave each other realistic goals on each aspect of the project, dividing the tasks into the following categories:
Every aspect we would work on from there would be aimed at achieving our goal: to get the first paying customer within 6 months (so by mid-April 2019, let’s see if we can do it 💪) from the start of the project.
From that day on and in the following two months, we started focusing on:
1) Building a MVP that could include only what we considered essential, leaving it as simple as possible. The great part of the features we wanted to include in the MVP have been developed and we expect to launch the product by mid-March. To date, the product looks like something like this 🌼 :
2) Set up a geo-localized marketing strategy: for the type of company we’d like to build, we tought it was crucial for us to be acting “glocal” from day 1: we have built and indexed a website and started a blog in 4 languages (EN, FR, ES and IT) to reach as many people as possible on our target search keywords: despite the huge amount of energy it takes at the beginning, we are convinced that this effort on SEO will pay off in the long run 🌍
3) Continue the conversation with the first potential customers, partners and investors (yes, we considered the possibility of raising a pre-seed of around $150K to help finance the launch phase, but we decided to leave it for a post-revenue stage 💰)
4) Keep generating new leads (coming from both paid and non-paid channels: a mix between FB ads, content and outbound - repeating the same test we did on the Italian market in other countries) that would commit to test our product from day 1: to date, more than 45 companies signed up on our site and we are ready with 15 of them to start with a beta test 🏁
5) Designed an affiliate program that will help our product to go viral. This is why every Callbell user (even on a free plan) will automatically become one of our affiliates when installing our widget on his website. This is a way to allow everyone to start monetizing their website traffic when bringing us new users, thanks to the classic “powered by” link under the chat widget ⚡
I would like to share more on each of the 5 categories, but the post would become too long so I will try to publish one next with more details about each point 📌. Moreover, we do not know if this is necessarily the right strategy to follow (each project is quite unique and need to follow different paths) but what is important is to know that we put all our energy to understand if it was worthwhile to be working on this project from here to al least the next 2 years.
So here we are today…
These first months have been intense and we are aware that there is still a lot to go and new challenges to face. What I can easily say is that, despite what may happen in the future, I feel like this experience has taught us so much in a very short space of time! And this is a fantastic feeling! 😍
As we would like transparency to be one of our core values, from now on we will try to update you on all the evolutions of the project, hoping that this can be useful to those who want to embark on a similar path.
That’s all for now! Thank you for joining us up here and talk soon!
The Callbell Team 🔔
