Taking on Giants in the Contact Center Space: UJET CEO, Anand Janefalkar (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about how you got into the market? So you have this idea that you were going to do something quite different in the contact center world. How did you get this off the ground? Did you build something and started getting customers or did you raise money right away? What was your path to getting your idea to fruition?

Anand Janefalkar: Very good question. Right away, I wanted to make sure that I was building something that is real, that can be demonstrated, and can truthfully measure how this would make an impact on customer satisfaction. I worked with a couple of contractors and built an MVP.

Sramana Mitra: What was in the MVP? What did you decide what’s needed to be in the MVP given what you were trying to prove out? >>>

Taking on Giants in the Contact Center Space: UJET CEO, Anand Janefalkar (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What exactly was the form that you were offering and was going to take to address all the issues and pain points that you just talked about?

Anand Janefalkar: It was to completely redesign the architecture. After talking to industry experts and to people that have sold to a lot of contact centers, I found that the architecture of contact software, in 2015 and even today, are really based on the origins of the on-premise hardware architecture. They were designed for physical devices whether they’re servers or MPLS lines that are connected to PBX’s. All of those were very archaic. Those were based on the times before the smartphone or the cloud era. >>>

Taking on Giants in the Contact Center Space: UJET CEO, Anand Janefalkar (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year does that bring us up to?

Anand Janefalkar: It brings us up to 2011. Motorola was an amazing company to be an employee. It was a little difficult to be a consumer. I got very jaded with a little bit of inaccurate marketing. Phone’s not selling to the potential of the hardware that we’ve been building. I decided that it was time for a change. Seven years is a long time. I decided to move to the West Coast. I did a couple of short stint but essentially ended up at Jawbone that had another extremely impressive product line in audio products. >>>

Taking on Giants in the Contact Center Space: UJET CEO, Anand Janefalkar (Part 1)

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We’re seeing new SaaS companies emerge that are taking on giant categories. In such businesses, positioning is extremely important. Read how Anand has positioned to get to 40 customers in the contact center software category.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning. >>>

Bootstrapping from Arizona to $10 Million: Joshua Strebel, CEO of Pagely (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Talk to me a bit about doing this in Tucson, Arizona. What are the dynamics? What is the community like and to what extent are you leveraging that community’s pros and cons?

Joshua Strebel: In the early days, we were based in Phoenix first. We moved to Tucson about four years ago. Arizona, as a whole, has a burgeoning and a very vibrant technology entrepreneurship community. They’re not Austin, Silicon Valley, or Seattle. I think it works in our favor though.

I like to use this analogy. The desert is harsh and hot. Resources are scarce. Cacti learned to soak in the water when it comes, then hold onto it to get through the whole year. I think that’s a lot like how companies are built in Arizona. They’re sustainable, smaller, and wiser. They really focus on making the most of the resources they have. >>>

Bootstrapping from Arizona to $10 Million: Joshua Strebel, CEO of Pagely (Part 4)

Joshua Strebel: We really enjoy those complex, harder, and out-of-the-normal WordPress workflow cases. There’s also this site called bringatrailer.com. These are a couple of entrepreneurs that probably invite you for one of these interviews. They started with a little online auto auction site and now they’ve gone on to become one of the premier private auction online destinations. They came to us with the requirement of one server and they’re now on 14 or 15 servers. We have them load out across all this hardware to sustain their huge and ever growing traffic footprint.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. What percentage of your business is product versus service? You said you do a lot of custom work.

Joshua Strebel: When I say custom work, it’s mostly just in the architecture design going into the product.

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Bootstrapping from Arizona to $10 Million: Joshua Strebel, CEO of Pagely (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the point where you hit the $1 million annual revenue run rate mark?

Joshua Strebel: I think that was about 2011 to 2012. So, it took about two and a half to three years to get to a million a year.

Sramana Mitra: That’s very good. With a bootstrapped company, that’s very good. What were some of the strategic moves there after that made a big difference in your trajectory? >>>

Bootstrapping from Arizona to $10 Million: Joshua Strebel, CEO of Pagely (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What were some of the mistakes?

Joshua Strebel: Not really knowing how to market. For designers and developers, I think it’s so easy to build a product. It’s really hard to get that product into the hands of your customers. If you recall in that time period, when Twitter and Facebook were new, the only way to get your product out there was PPC ads or the TechCrunch way if you’re taking VC.

So we just tried our best with social media to get out the door and going. It still took us a long time to dial in our value proposition in our messaging and understand how to talk to our target market. >>>