V1 to TNSH to SHv3 — A journey of bootstrapped SaaS product
SalesHandy — Ahmedabad based tech startup serving 4000+ B2B customers & 20k+ freemium users.
I’m sharing our journey (as it is — unaltered) how we started & navigated through major product iteration & mindset, and the learnings from it.
What’s inside?
- About SalesHandy
- Origin of the Idea
- V1 to TNSH
- Mistakes
- TNSH to SHv3
- An opportunity
SalesHandy
As the title says, it’s a SaaS product.
SalesHandy is an email productivity suite. It notifies the email sender when the recipient opens the email or clicks the link. Plus, it enables users to send personalized cold emails with automated follow-ups using their own email addresses by connecting Gmail, Gsuite, Office 365, or Outlook account.
The intro & home page above is going to change soon. I will get back to it at the end of the story.
Founding team
Piyush (Tech), Dhruv (Marketing & Ops), and Arpan co-founded the company. Arpan moved on to found an online gaming company.
Origin of the Idea
Back in 2015; I, Piyush & Arpan shared the same office space to work on multiple products.
With the work premises, we shared a lunch table too. In 2015, SaaS started gaining the second level of traction. We were curious about it. We kept discussing new SaaS products launched over the lunch table.
Curiosity led us to an interesting category called sales engagement and enablement platforms. We got hooked with a “live-presentation tool”.
We started building the product. Arpan and Piyush coded it. I started marketing the idea. We managed to get users who were ready to share feedback about the product. That was a winning point. Continuous feedback from users led us to an interesting category called email tracking. We started researching the email tracking space.
Later on, we realized that live presentation was a niche problem to be solved. Hence, we dropped the idea of building a live presentation tool and finally entered into the email productivity space.
In between, we 3 got separated. I & Piyush joined SalesHandy full time. Arpan exited SalesHandy and moved to found an online gaming company.
Since then I and Piyush have been driving the product (SalesHandy) & company (Ikigai).
V1 to TNSH
V1 — 1st version of the product was built in a scrappy way. In the race of speed v/s quality, speed was winning always back then. We compromised a lot with the quality of code and architecture. Choosing speed over quality was the right decision. Speed helped us conduct product experiments and to figure out the product-market fit. Not months but in weeks we could ship the features/bug fixes and present it to users. That helped us learn. (That’s Subjective. Early in product days, it’s better to run experiments then building pixel-perfect products.)
After we discovered the email tracking space and had enough initial traction it was time to explore the email automation space. We developed the first version of email automation. But, due to compromises made earlier in code quality, it was getting difficult to build fast and reliable software.
Then comes the big event. TNSH i.e The New SalesHandy. We decided to rewrite the software. Rework the architecture and backend to match the quality needed. At this point in time in the race of speed v/s quality. We had chosen quality. And as we all know, quality comes with time investment. It was a painful 9 months. During those 9 months, we had to fix the bugs in the existing version, drive development for the new version, migration of existing customers to the new platform, hiring-firing, and much more all parallelly. Those were the unforgettably painful 9-months we had.
It was a rebirth of the SalesHandy in the form of TNSH. The new SalesHandy. The team was fully charged with the new energy and excitement.
During those days, our office was operational for 3 days (24x7). We procured mattresses to sleep within the office, round the clock engineers worked to fix the glitches from migration.
We saved the CCTV Camera footage of those moments. Also, a few video recordings of Kamlesh (Tech Lead) & Piyush announcing the release of TNSH. On the right, I have shared some of the glimpses to that.
After the release, we lost a few customers; but that was temporary. In 2–3 months we were back again with a stronger platform to build the software faster and reliable.
Mistakes we did while building TNSH
- We didn’t consider re-thinking user persona, target market, GTM, or any optimization in that direction.
- Design; we did ourselves.
- We didn’t spend time to plan and then execute.
- I was very less involved in the product, I was just looking after deadlines and pushing Piyush and Team instead of understanding and helping them.
- We tried to develop too much. That slowed us. We tried building bulky software. Instead of floating the lighter version first.
TNSH to SHv3
That was Aug. 2018, now in 2020, we are changing the product directions, which is bringing massive changes in the product. An event similar to the TNSH moments, a version upgrade.
We are in the middle of re-architecting the software to evolve the product in the next direction. But, unlike earlier, it’s more of rethinking, restrategizing, redesigning the product then just rewriting the code.
We are pivoting from a category email productivity tools to a sales engagement tool for an outbound sales team.
It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure. — Bill Gates
We have ensured that we do not make the same mistakes again. And here is the list of mistakes we are not repeating again.
Mistakes we’re not repeating
- We hired an expert UI/UX designer. We are already done with the rebranding work. We have a better understanding of the importance of the design system. We are on it; to bring consistency across marketing, product, sales, support experiences.
- We have spent enough time understanding the user persona and clarifying the new target markets and pain points. We have read books and researched the space well — to make a confident move.
- We have defined and adopted the product development methodology. We are following the Shape Up / Basecamp’s way to build the new product.
- We’ve product manager to shape up the user stories
- We are building the product piece by piece. Not shipping the whole big software at one go. “Less is More”.
Major changes expected in SHv3
- Fresh and consistent look n’ feel
- Increased flexibility
- Built for a specific user persona — sales development teams.
- Covering more area of JTBD cycle
- Serving long term use case
An Opportunity
If you’re looking for an exciting opportunity to lead the engineering of v3 then, we would like to talk.
Below’s the link to the job description.
In the upcoming series of articles, I am writing more about our current marketing strategies, how we gained traction initially, growth hacks those worked, key achievements, SaaS using SaaS — Tools & Tech we used, Deadly and costly failures, bootstrapping SaaS, and a couple of more success and failure stories we have passed through.
Comment below and show the sign of appreciation (By giving claps & likes) if you find this insightful. That will boost us to write more!
Until then!
