Building a Virtual Company to $20 Million: Rob Cheng, CEO of PC Pitstop (Part 1)

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Rob figured out the joys of virtual companies back in 1999. Today, he runs a 65-person virtual company that makes $20 million in revenue. Wonderful story.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Taking on Giants in the Contact Center Space: UJET CEO, Anand Janefalkar (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk a bit about your pricing model? How did you come up with that pricing model?

Anand Janefalkar: For a lot of companies in this sector, innovation is very rare. Their revenue models were based on trying to fit in one-time fees or maintenance fees and all of that to service that technical debt. We decided that we don’t have any of these hidden fees.  >>>

Taking on Giants in the Contact Center Space: UJET CEO, Anand Janefalkar (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of positioning, there are obviously a lot of enterprise contact software players and there are some leaders. Right now, Suite within Oracle is a major player and has been around with deep integrations and a deep presence in the industry. Once you sorted out your positioning, whom do you consider as potential partners? Whom do you consider as direct competitors? What did the positioning shake out to be?

Anand Janefalkar: We figured out that we wanted to focus on real-time customer support. We didn’t try to do everything. We didn’t want to be a ticketing system as well as an FAQ system as well as real-time. We thought that the real-time aspect is where it’s broken. That’s the part where if there’s a bad customer experience, customers leave and that causes churn. >>>

Taking on Giants in the Contact Center Space: UJET CEO, Anand Janefalkar (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How many customers did you raise series A with? How many customers did you raise series B with to net it out?

Anand Janefalkar: I don’t think we have these numbers to share with you today. But before series A, we didn’t have a website. UJET had no website before May 4.

Sramana Mitra: You can have customers without having a website. A lot of companies do stealth mode product development and customer immersion before having a website. Not having a website doesn’t mean anything. >>>

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. >>>