Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If this is not too much proprietary information, what were the keywords that you were able to get a lead on? You said that buyers were the same with the web analytics buyers. Were you then advertising on the web analytics keywords?

Ali Behnam: No, we weren’t. By 2012, which is when we started doing marketing, people were starting to look for tag management solutions.

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Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to get the product to market?

Ali Behnam: Probably about a year. We had an early version of the product that we released in January 2011 but didn’t do everything we wanted it to do. Another six months later in July of 2011, we finally launched Tealium IQ which is the basis of the product that we’re still selling today. If you take the development from beginning all the way to the launch of Tealium IQ, we’re talking about a little less than a year.

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Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You wanted to make the switch to a product company with a hypothesis that this is what you think is needed in the market. You wanted to switch off your consulting business and turn it into a product company in 2011?

Ali Behnam: A big part of the product that we had built was taking all the different use cases that we were solving for our customers. Different customers have different use cases. Through our engagement with various customers, we had seen a lot of different use cases that we needed to satisfy for our product to function properly. We wanted to make sure that the first iteration of the product could actually satisfy a lot of those use cases because those were the common problems that we were seeing among many customers – not just the ones that we were consulting. Thanks to our consulting background, we were able to see so many problems that prospects face and we ended up building up a product that could satisfy those use cases. >>>

Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 2)

Ali Behnam: Early on as we got engaged in our analytics practice, we realized that there is a big need for help with tagging. A lot of customers were unsatisfied with their analytics implementation. The number one cause of that dissatisfaction was the fact that their implementation was not done in a proper way and that has to do with tagging. Tagging is basically putting a piece of code on a website that allows you to capture the right data and send that data to the analytics solution. A lot of customers had challenges associated with that. We realized that there is a big need for streamlining the tagging work that customers need to do.

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Identifying Customer Pain Through Consulting Services: Tealium Co-Founder & President, Ali Behnam (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Three years of web analytics consulting led Ali and his co-founder to identify a core customer need around which he is now building a high-growth, venture-funded company.

Sramana Mitra: Ali, let’s start with your own personal journey. Where were you born and raised? What kind of story leads up to Tealium?

Ali Behnam: I was born in Iran. Our family migrated outside Iran after the revolution. We actually ended up finding ourselves in France, which is where I got my high school degree. Later on, I came to San Diego for my college education at UC San Diego. I just fell in love with San Diego. Following my graduation, I decided that San Diego is where I want to spend the rest of my life.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Let me suggest something else as well. You know there’re so many cloud apps right now. It’s becoming very fragmented and there is a large number of point solutions all over the place. With an enterprise company with lots of resources, you can potentially avail of integration resources to manage all these and to coordinate and link things up. There is also a huge amount of cloud services and applications consumption in the small business category. There, the resources just do not exist to be able to stitch all these things up and to integrate. What is your view of that world?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 6)

Mark Mader: Then, there was the promise in native app development that went, “Why don’t you build it with a framework and the framework can propagate your app to all these different device platforms?” That failed miserably. The performance did not meet client’s expectations for almost every provider who tried that. Ten people said, “What’s the promise of HTML 5?” That also failed. User experience level was not high enough. We’ve gone from a web app world to where people’s expectations on solutions being, “I want a compelling web experience plus I want a compelling native app experience so that I can access, update, and share my information from wherever I am.”

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Given that’s your sweet spot, whom do you consider as your direct competitor?

Mark Mader: By far in a way, the largest direct competitor remains the traditional spreadsheet. There’s not any other SaaS provider today that uses our form factor – the spreadsheet grid that we present in a collaborative way. When you look at the other markets right now – whether it’s email automation, surveying, CRM, or file sync and share – most of them have multiple participants. Look at Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, or SkyDrive, you could just go on and on about all the competitors in those specific niche categories. I think what happened in our category was people conceded the market to Google and Microsoft. When in fact, there was a huge opportunity to innovate on something that is 20 years old in concept. >>>