Meet Continually—Helping you never miss a lead on your website 🤖
What problem is Continually solving?
When someone visits your website to get more info or to request a product demo, they expect you to reply straight away. That’s hard when you have to sleep and go home at night! But research around responsiveness shows that if you take more than 60 seconds to get back to a customer, your chance of doing business starts to go down. With Continually, unattended Live Chat is a thing of the past!
How are you solving the problem?
We’ve built a single line of code that you can add to your website, that allows you to have real time conversations with customers, and also automate helpful replies when you’re away. You can sequence the types of replies, including linking them to relevant content and scheduling meetings, whilst profiling the potential customer in order to begin a useful conversation with them when you’re back online.
Why did you decide to work on this problem?
So the insight behind this was from a product I worked on previously. I would get excited when big global businesses were interested in what we were building and would fill in our contact form. Then their customer journey would see them added to CRM software and a lead score generated to tell us whether or not that customer was a natural fit for a salesperson to call back. It wasn’t a great customer experience and definitely wasn’t centered on customer behaviour and personas.
I couldn’t help but think this didn’t fit with the trends we were seeing with instant messaging — such as WhatsApp and Slack — that use short, instant conversational interactions. I realised this was an area of friction, so I got started and was lucky to build a team of four to begin iterating on what the potential solution might be!
Why did you join the Ignite NI Accelerator?
I was really excited about the Ignite NI accelerator launching and it turned out to be an important inflection point for us. I’d started the business and it was at a very early stage — so as a founder you don’t make any money. The accelerator became a forcing function for us to get out and talk to people and not flow with our natural tendency to keep it all close to our chest whilst the product was unfinished.
“It turned out to be an important inflection point for us.”
Where are you now compared to when you started the programme?
When we started back in March, we had just shipped a basic MVP which had a handful of people using the platform. Come June, we had a refined product, and now have over 100 users — with an an audience spanning 195 countries! — and we’re generating revenue. I’m proud to say this tool that we’ve been building here in Belfast has been seen and used by people almost all over the world!
Share one important learning with other founders:
The best way to get the right answer is to go out there, be humble and accept that your work is imperfect in some way. The more you do it, the more you learn to recognise that people give you critical feedback because they want to help you improve on your idea. To me that’s what the accelerator environment is really about: it’s taking things that are unfinished and pushing them forward.
“Be humble and accept that your work is imperfect in some way.”
Would you recommend an accelerator to other founders?
I would highly recommend the iterative nature of an accelerator that exposes you to a wealth of mentors. The Ignite experience put us in front of people like Sarah Friar — previously CFO of Square, now CEO of Nextdoor — when in San Francisco. Insights that you don’t get in many places and can really sharpen the focus.
Going through a really intense process every week of repeatedly telling our story and explaining what we’re building — to both programme and external mentors — meant we made a lot of progress really quickly. We could see the product becoming more useful which showed in the number of customers we were engaging with going up; it really created a great velocity for us!
What would you do differently if you could start again?
I’ve learned that there’s no better time than today to engage with the audience that you want to target. When you’re building a product, it’s natural to assume you know the features to build next. But there might be 10 other features that customers really need and are even more important — so the sooner you learn that, the sooner the product becomes more useful 👊
“…there’s no better time than today to engage with the audience that you want to target.”
Interested in the IgniteNI Accelerator 2019?
Check out full programme details on our latest blog 🚀
If you would like to speak to one of the IgniteNI team, then feel free to reach out to hello@igniteni.com and we’d be happy to answer any questions you’ve got!
Keep up to date with programme news on our Twitter: @IgniteAccelNI
