Bootstrapping from Canada: FluidWare Co-CEO Aydin Mirzaee (Part 5)

Sramana: Essentially you had to reposition yourselves in the marketplace. Where did you find your sweet spot?

Aydin Mirzaee: We decided to focus entirely on the super niche market and dominate that particular market before moving on. That would let us be a big fish in a small pond, and we would worry about the other ponds later. The first area we started focusing on was federal government departments. In 2008 when we were approaching them, they all told us that what we were doing was awesome but they had issues with our SaaS model. There was no way they were going to send their data to our cloud.

Our answer was to just keep working on the product. There were new accessibility standards emerging which required compatibility with screen readers because the government wanted anyone in the country to be able to take surveys easily. We looked at all of the regulations and W3C standards and we built a product that met those standards. We were the only product, at that time, that met those standards.

We started meeting with every government department that we could, I think we got to 16 of the 80, and the answer we got was that they were not going to give us any sales. After doing this for several months, there was a woman from Health Canada who gave us a contract. That was the watershed. All the other government agencies were just waiting for someone else to make the first move.

Sramana: Tell me more about that first customer.

Aydin Mirzaee: It is one of those situations where she just wanted to be nice to us. She did not want to say no like everyone else. She had started in the private sector and moved to the government, so she was not fond of bureaucracy. She was known to push the limits and she had a lot of authority.

All it took was one person to believe in us. It did not become easy overnight, but at least we had a reference customer. Then we learned the next big lesson which was to term our initial contact with them as a pilot project. It was acceptable for a pilot project to fail so people were willing to work with a startup customer. We started doing that with a lot of different organizations. We did not do pilot projects free. People won’t use it if you give it away. The other party must associate value with what you are doing.

Sramana: What happened after you got your first paid project?

Aydin Mirzaee: As soon as we got the pilot project, we went back to everyone that we had talked to. Over the course of two years, we pretty much got every major federal department as a customer. They all used FluidSurveys on an enterprise basis for public research and feedback. That was really great because it gave us huge standing. From there we went after universities.

Through 2010 we only focused on Canada. We had started to get brand awareness. We went after provincial departments and municipal departments as well. That all led to more revenue coming and which allowed us to hire more people. We kept hiring more and more people and started investing more and more into the product. That also allowed us to get a marketing budget. Once we had a marketing budget, we were ready to expand outside of our borders. We wanted to get customers in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping from Canada: FluidWare Co-CEO Aydin Mirzaee
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