100 paying customers in less than 2 years
by Saravana KumarIt's one of our proud moments as a team reaching our first milestone of 100 paying customers (including some Fortune 100 companies and unicorns from the startup world).
The idea for Document360 came about 2 years ago when we were struggling to find a solution for our own challenges. We took the bet, did a company-wide hackathon, then later assembled a team and worked meticulously for the past 2 years taking the approach of "Product First".
We handheld and on-boarded one-customer at a time, listening carefully to their challenges and prioritizing and addressing their needs.
Today we have some prestigious companies like Microsoft, Monday.com, IATA, Customer.io on our first 100 customers list.
It's important to work with such big brands at your early stage. Their requirements are tough and it helps to stabilize your product maturity.
It's a joint team effort across the board to reach this important milestone.
-
1
Congrats, what an amazing achievement!
Can I ask you what would be your best advice(s) to approach / acquire enterprise customers?
-
1
It will depend on your product.
I started the company back in 2011 with a niche product called BizTalk360, it's a value-added enterprise security/governance product for Microsoft BizTalk Server, today we have over 650 enterprise customers (including Microsoft). In our case, we are dominating this niche, there are no other players.
We do a variety of things like typical content marketing stuff (you can search for anything with BizTalk Server and you'll definitely see one of our articles on the first page result), we do our annual event INTEGRATE (attended by over 500 attendees), we present the product in a lot of technical user groups (relevant audience), we do outreach via our sales team, we receive a lot of inbound inquiries in the form of free trial, demo, price quote, etc.
Basically to answer your question, getting your enterprise customer is not any different. At the end of the day, it's some human who is going to make that purchase decision and you need to convince/interest them.
A lot of enterprise deal will start with one person identifying your product, getting convinced and then slowly bringing his/her team to get interested in your product. This is a bottom-up approach (or land and expand model). The other form is top-down, which is pretty hard, convincing CXO is harder because those people are always busy and it's a hard sell.
-
1
Thank you for your detailed advice, @saravanamv. You're an inspiration and your story gives me the motivation I need to continue working on my product, aimed at enterprise customers, which is definitely a daunting challenge.
-
-
-
1
Congratulations!
