The Quiet Crisis: When My Sales and Customer Support Widget Decided To Take an Unplanned Break in Sending My Entire Team Notifications

If you’ve seen my past content on Indie Hackers, like the interview I did where I revealed how getting arrested for cyber crime led to me founding my current company, Proxycurl, you’ll know I don’t mind sharing when I’ve made a mistake.

You can’t have success without a couple of mistakes or failures along the way.

That’s just not possible, and if anyone tells you differently, they probably have a course to sell you...

Even Lionel Messi misses shots sometimes.

But, inevitably, with consistent efforts, success does eventually come – like for example, I also shared on Indie Hackers how I scaled my B2B data enrichment company, Proxycurl, to $100K MRR with cold email and SEO.

That milestone wouldn’t have been possible if I had given up the first time I made a mistake. Heck, it wouldn’t have been possible if I had given up the 50th time I made a mistake.

Every single mistake made should be viewed as an opportunity to learn and grow (glass half full kind of thing).

Anyway, that said, I have a story to share with you about a mistake I made…

It’s about how I accidentally ignored half of my sales inquiries (and customer inquiries) for over a month at Proxycurl, all because of one simple Tidio update.

You see, on Proxycurl’s website, every page contains a little Tidio chat widget:

Previously, it served the purpose of allowing me to receive sales/customer inquiries in a simple way.

I had it set up to receive messages, and then I would later email them back, responding to the inquiry.

However, a while back (unknown to me), they rolled out a live chat feature – cool, no big deal, but when live chats aren’t responded to, instead of emailing me, they created a ticket – and I had to go and manually check a tickbox to have those new tickets sent to me.

I didn’t tick that box.

This means I wasn’t notified of any new chat inquiries for a little over a month, and that really ticks me off.

I should also note we have a public-facing email, “[email protected]” that we put out there, so it’s not like we suddenly stopped receiving emails.

We still got them, we were just missing about half of them…

If we stopped receiving emails altogether, then it would’ve been obvious something was off, but we kept receiving just enough, to the point that I didn’t notice.

At least… not until a month later.

Not good.

I think the problem goes back to one thing:

Why does Tidio need to add useless features?

Why not just keep things simple?

For me, I signed up for one simple reason:

To put a chat widget on my website that allows visitors/customers to send me a message in a convenient fashion.

Honestly, I don’t even really care about the live functionality either, I used it mostly as a convenient “contact us” form on every page.

But it’s bigger than them just rolling out the “tickets” feature, if you look at their homepage now, and their main selling point:

It has entirely changed from not only when they first started, but even a year ago.

It’s a classic case of shiny object syndrome.

For example, let’s go back to Tidio’s homepage from 2020:

Now let’s look at Tidio’s homepage from 2021-2022:

Wow, in 3 years, it progressed from:

A better way to connect with your customers
Then, a customer service platform integrated with sales functionality
Finally, a buzzword-centric feature-filled AI-powered customer service tool?

Here’s my guess as to why:

Tidio just took on more VC money

Technically, they’ve had a couple of rounds (starting back in 2018), but they just had another $25 million dollar Series B round in 2022.

Usually, by the time a Series B round comes around, a problem/solution fit is clearly made and it’s all about scaling a proven business model to fit a certain amount of existing demand.

Seed and pre-seed are usually all about narrative, such as what’s going to be the next hot thing to take over (think web3, fintech, all of the recent narratives that have been hot recently).

Right now, it’s AI (as you’ve seen Tidio shift into).

Series A is typically taking a company that’s starting to find its fit and giving it the funds to keep reiterating and finding a definite product/market fit.

Then by series C, the founder's ownership is seriously diluted, and it’s primarily just about getting the company to an IPO.

But along the way between pre-seed, and Series A and beyond, companies tend to lose themselves. Especially when they partner with the wrong people.

There are a couple of reasons how you could explain that, but the main one is:

Once you take on VC money, you can’t slow down

For a startup taking on VC money is effectively selling your soul.

You’re taking a quick sum of cash, which, granted, will take some stress off you temporarily… giving you some cushion, and a guaranteed salary.

But in return, you’re guaranteeing yourself that you can’t slow down.

Every single achievement you hit is just another small milestone that’s about grinding to the next – because you’re operating on someone else's money, instead of your own.

That’s exactly what leads to startups losing themselves.

Rather than being good at one specific thing, what they started out destined to do, they get lost in 80 different fads, or what’s hot in a pursuit to constantly be growing, and adding more money.

Which sometimes backfires.

Especially when they start doing things like raising prices and removing or changing core functionality that brought you to the product in the first place.

Personally, I would never take on VC money because I want 100% control over the vision and direction of my company.

I would never dilute that, and I’m fine if it takes a little bit longer.

But, don’t get me wrong…

A VC firm might be the right fit for your startup

It entirely depends on the individual business, and also the lifestyle you’re looking for.

There are benefits to operating on someone else's money – and sometimes, it gives companies the leverage they need to scale effectively.

Plus, if you’re trying to enter a market that already has an existing competitor with a firm grasp on market share and they’ve already raised a couple of rounds, it can make it significantly harder to compete without the same level of funding.

It should be a decision you weigh out for yourself.

Just know going into it, it’s very likely that your level of control over the vision and the direction of the company will decrease – that’s something you’ll have to be okay with.

Further, in the pursuit of seeking further growth, your product might be forced to entirely change from what it was originally designed to be.

But, in return, you do gain a certain level of stability to help you focus on growing.

I should also clarify:

I don’t have a beef with VC firms or Tidio

It’s partially my fault I didn’t notice for over a month that I suddenly stopped receiving email notifications from my sales and customer support widget, I admit.

That’s where my mistake comes in – not being more proactively on top of things, and noticing sooner.

But, it also doesn’t make sense why Tidio would roll out an update that enabled notifications unless you manually enabled them.

Furthermore, Tidio has practically entirely changed as a product from when I first signed up.

It’s a boat with wheels now, full of unnecessary features that I don’t need. A frequent occurrence of VC-backed products.

Not only do I not need them, I just straight up don’t want them.

Who would want this?

What happened to trying to do one thing really well?

I don’t need yet another AI tool. Just allow me to provide customer support.

Production dilution is bad

Don’t allow your original product to become diluted to the point that it’s a boat on wheels.

VC funding is frequently a fast track to achieve that, but it’s entirely possible to lose your original vision for your startup without an excessive amount of money being thrown at you, too.

You don’t want to be yet another product or service that’s trying to do everything, and you definitely don’t want to hop from fad to fad.

Adding endless amounts of shiny new features to your product might help attract a couple of new ICPs, but, are you sacrificing the focus of the original product as a consequence?

And in return, will that backfire?

Companies like Dropbox and Instagram succeeded by doing one thing very well, and both of those things were extremely simple.

By adding a bunch of shiny new features and trying to appeal to everyone (in the pursuit of more money, often by the pressure of VCs), you effectively dilute your problem/solution fit and end up with a complex and bloated product.

Be willing to say no

To customers, team members, investors, and beyond.

As you grow, new features and ideas will be offered or even forced onto you. But, you need to be willing to say no.

In fact, you should say no more often than you say yes.

Focus on getting the core value proposal of your product right first.

For example, Proxycurl is years old, and we’re just now finally starting to nail our core value proposition.

We originally started out being essentially a LinkedIn scraping company, and we’ve now shifted towards being a B2B data enrichment company that sources our data in several different ways and provides it in a couple of different ways.

Such as an API, or selling our dataset(s) in entirety.

Furthermore, we’re building Proxycurl for developers specifically. That’s why we power the backend of many of the B2B applications you see out there, like sales prospecting applications.

So, if it doesn’t serve the purpose of providing (and/or enriching) data on people and companies, it serves no purpose here – and we’re pretty honest about that.

At the end of the day, it’s programmers implementing our B2B data into their applications to do with whatever they’d like (such as automating cold emailing with ChatGPT’s API and our API).

The one exception to this is Sapiengraph, which is our Google Sheets extension powered by Proxycurl and LinkDB – it’s designed for everyone due to its simplistic nature, but it was extremely low-hanging fruit that filled a demand and required very little extra effort from us. It was more of just another convenient medium for providing our data.

Don’t allow yourself to lose focus

Therefore, our number one goal needs to be to provide rich, accurate, and fresh data. Plus, it needs to be reliable, and scalable, so that they can trust us to power their backend.

Adding sexy new front-end features doesn’t accomplish any of that.

Instead, working on the boring backend features like making our scraping more sophisticated, reliable, and efficient, as well as diversifying our datasets to source our data from more than LinkedIn – because that’s what’s going to improve our processes for providing rich, accurate, and fresh data.

That’s what’s going to give our clients the best experience with our product. That’s what’s going to keep them around for years to come.

It may not be fun or sexy, and it certainly doesn’t lead to an exciting product update on your blog to say you’ve made your crawler 3x more reliable, but it’s a core improvement that will actually move the needle.

There’s always going to be a new shiny object dangled in front of you, but often, you already know the right thing to do, and it’s the slow and steady boring way.

It’s even more relevant if you decide taking VC funds is the right fit for you, because if you accept that money, you’ll be constantly pressured to grow.

Normally, that manifests itself in the way of the original product or service entirely losing focus of the core problem/solution fit it was originally created for.

It’s important to listen to feedback, but don’t lose track of the original reason the product was created.

Adding new features doesn’t mean more customers

I’ve noticed that engineer-minded startup founders (myself included) tend to think more features equate to more customers.

But in my experience, this has actually been the opposite. It just leads to more confusion and churn.

Making your product or service as simple as humanly possible while still solving a major problem is the goal. More features just make it more complex.

What adds new customers is picking a traffic channel and sticking to it. For us, that was cold email and SEO.

It could be the same or different for you, but regardless, practically any of these channels could work. You just need to stick with it and remain focused on it.

Put good relevant content out in the world, and I promise – providing your product or service solves a real problem, you will continue growing with consistent efforts.

It’s that simple

Keep reiterating your product, simplifying the value proposition and your messaging – then simply consistently work towards getting in front of people that your value proposition (solution) will appeal to.

There are no shortcuts, magic bullets, or sexy secret instant AI hacks. Consistency and work.

You also don’t need to waste hundreds of thousands of dollars with someone else's money to grow your product.

In fact, I’d argue that if you’re having trouble scaling your business on your own, then you probably aren’t ready to take on any funding (and many would debate with me on this). Instead, I think need to work on perfecting your problem/solution fit first.

Closing thoughts

If you take one thing from this post, it’s to keep your head down and focus your attention and efforts.

Plus, as you grow (or in the pursuit of growth), don’t allow your product or service to become a distant bloated memory of the problem/solution fit it was originally designed to be.

You’ll thank yourself later.

Oh, and it’s a good idea to keep an eye on your chat widget to make sure it didn’t randomly stop notifying you that people wanted to hand you money because it rolled out the hundredth update of features you didn’t care about.

Speaking of that, do you have any good ideas for a self-hosted chat widget that isn’t trying to do a thousand different things at once? If so, let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading!

Steven,

Founder of Proxycurl

P.S. If you’re interested in integrating rich B2B data on people and companies into your workflow or application, consider using Proxycurl’s API to do that.

Plus, if you’re interested in a massive data foundation for your application, our entire dataset is available here.

Last but not least, if you’re not a programmer, you can still access the same rich and high-quality data Proxycurl provides through Sapiengraph, our Google Sheets extension that pulls the data directly into Google Sheets.