How the Startup TeleCRM found its USP & Achieved Product Market Fit
At Flamon, we plan to become ‘the Oracle of India’ for the digital-first sales teams in post-Jio India with TeleCRM. Our flagship mobile-first tele-sales CRM product for sales teams that have previously managed their sales workflows on messy excel sheets. We plan to do away with the mess and headaches of excel sheets so that managers and business owners can monitor and manage their sales teams from our simple and intuitive mobile app.
The co-founders
The story that best illustrates the relationship between the co-founders is how we bootstrapped our first product MakeBizCards. It never really took off so after 2 years of struggling and a couple of pivots we drifted apart and went our separate ways, but once bitten the start of a bug doesn’t really leave you so within just a few months we came back together to build our 2nd major product TeleCRM.
The Team and culture
The entire TeleCRM team was built in Covid times and in Aligarh, UP. We’ve been fortunate enough to be able to create a create team culture around the ethos of working really hard and celebrating every win. So when it comes to finishing a feature or creating the build time becomes an obsolete concept. And whether it’s the first annual license sale or the first renewal every win is celebrated. So much so that the leading team is the last one to think about ‘party to banti h’.
To be completely honest it’s been a little bit of a challenge to get smart people to come work from Aligarh but thanks to the team culture those who took the leap and came here won’t leave for the world.
The story of how we found product-market fit
When you are trying to create a new product you have to make hard choices
And if like us development is your strength then you tend to go back to adding more features. Because that feels like the cure to all the product-market fit ailments. Just this one feature and then all our troubles will be gone.
Interestingly enough it did happen for us just like that but in the most unexpected of ways.
And the story has lessons that every entrepreneur can learn
Version 1: The engineer’s choice
We built a Facebook CRM integration feature and a workflow based on that integration. It was obstructive and the users who tried it hated the workflow. The basic elements that use needed it were missing.
But amidst all the failures of the feature, we had something. Our secret recipe for victory a.k.a. user feedback.
Moving on to version 2
This time we took all the feedback, and we tried to solve just one user’s problems, end to end.
Today, 6 months later we have multiple integrations all of which use the same core mechanism as we had built-in Facebook lead capture CRM integration version 2.
And those integrations have become the reason why most organizations sign up for TeleCRM today.
Here are three lessons from the whole story.
- Do not assume, because in the beginning you really do not know much
- Get to use her feedback fast. Let users rip apart the first version of your solution because in that they are giving you your recipe for success.
- Make sure you have the right in that can last through this whole build-trash-rebuild loop
For more details, you can check out TeleCRM.
