Startup Spotlight Q&A: Swit
Josh Lee is the CEO & Founder of Swit, a team collaboration platform for the Enterprise. Swit launched just one year ago and recently won the coveted “Growth Startup of the Year” at Startup Grind’s 2020 Global Conference.
Check out what Josh had to say about the biggest challenges & milestones for his fast-growing company.
— In a single sentence, what does Swit do?
We provide enterprises with a team collaboration platform that combines team chat with task management in a revolutionary way.
– How did Swit come to be? What was the problem you found and the ‘aha’ moment?
We used to be heavy users of Slack, integrating multiple apps into it like Trello and Asana. But all we could do with those integrations was receive text-based notifications in selected channels. This actually doubled the number of distractions without getting more done. It was frustrating to go back and forth between chat and tasks. And so we built Swit to bring everything we needed to get things done into one convenient place for company-wide, cross-functional teams.
— What milestone are you most proud of so far?
We built Slack and Asana’s years of work in just one year, and with fewer resources. Our product performs better and our initial traction for user acquisition growth is also faster. We’re literally writing a new history.
— What are people most excited by when they first use Swit?
Beautiful design, fast performance, and interactive functionality. Tasks can be shared in a chat channel simply by dragging-and-dropping. Users are excited when they see they can move between workflows while maintaining context and data.
— Have you pursued funding and if so, what steps did you take?
We raised $7M Seed investment last year and have just started to raise $15M Series A investment, which I hope will be closed by the end of July.
—What KPIs are you tracking at Swit that you think will lead to revenue generation or growth?
Growth rate for daily active users is the KPI we currently care most about.
— What is one thing every founder should ask themselves before walking into a meeting with a potential investor?
Every single startup should have their own go-to-market strategies and make potential investors assured that their investment will be returned with exponential profit in time. Also, be yourself and find your fit!
— How do you build and develop talent?
We’ve been enjoying product-led growth with virality so far. We’ve just now started to hire talent for Marketing and Sales in the SF office.
— How do you manage growth vs sustainability?
We have two different GTM strategies. Freemium for initial fast growth and Premium for monetization. The first targets SME with a more marketing-dependent, individual contributor-driven, bottom-up GTM strategy. The other targets larger organizations with the opposite.
— What are the biggest challenges for the team?
If we say, “Swit is much better than the sum of Slack and Trello or Asana” no one believes us until they actually see Swit in action. The challenge for us, then, is getting those new audiences to try Swit for themselves.
— What’s been the biggest success for the team?
The market we’re in is the biggest and fastest growing industry across all Enterprise SaaS categories, but the existing team collaboration tools were designed and built only for small-sized single teams. There’s a huge innovation vacuum space Swit can fill by creating our own category and re-bundling functions.
— What advice would you give to other founders?
Lean startup methodology will never work for Enterprise startups. Your niche won’t be found in a shallow shore; Dive deep and hold a long-lasting oxygen tank.
