MetriStorm Attendance
A true biometric attendance system that is simple & seamless
We are gearing up for a public launch on 1st of December. The solution is now live at 7 locations, with ~150 users.
For all these, we simply shipped the hardware and shared a setup video. They were able to get it rolling all on their own with minimal support. Which I believe is a huge win for hardware lead SaaS.
There have been some great feedback on UI/UX which would have only come from these pilots. Hope to get it out in the public launch. Until then, keep hustling!
During initial research, it was very clear that lots of people (~5K Searches/month across India) for the attendance solution. I had observed that current solutions were offline, tedious and not real time. There were so many times when I wanted to speak to people and see if these are really 'the problems' and would they be willing to spend to fix these. Also when you think of a long term, you want to assess what else are the challenges and opportunities. When we launched, I started to speak to subscribers over phone about the solution. The conversations were brief and to the point. I was not getting to know the people behind these business to know all of the above. We soon started doing demos and was quite surprised how quickly people understood the solution. Not a single demo out of 10 , lasted for more than 15 mins. Although I had 15 more mins, didn't feel right holding on the conversation, especially when they were sold on the solution. That is when I started wishing for more local leads so that I could do in-person demos. It happened today.
The demo went very well and we might soon have our first 140 user account. The more exciting part was the conversation after it. Learnt so much from it. Some of the features we were thinking were definitely validated. Some new ones to evaluate. However the biggest learning was hardware lead SaaS solutions are just getting started and there is long way to go. . .
In person demos also feel so much more human. Looking forward to do more of these!
Not too sure if this too long an update :)
Reached out to early customers, did demos and things are rolling. Started doing demos even before the product was fully ready. There were quite a few bugs but the functionality was there. Pretty satisfying to see small business in India, will to pay for subscriptions. Companies spending under $100 for one time solutions, seeing value in product willing to pay 10x in LTV.
One of things I did before starting to build MetricStorm was to do a bit of research for search volume and ads costs. We got all these subscribers by spending less than $500 on google ads. All of the competition ads in the market are for one time hardware sales and metricstorm is all subscription. Have you relied on ads for early lead generation before other things pick up? What was your experience, is this normal ?
2 Comments
Congratulations @pinto on the latest milestone. From what I know the biometric system market is a crowded one but I guess there is still space for new companies to have a part of the market.
May I know how you have been marketing/doing sales to get in touch and sign up these customers?
Thanks. Yeah it's definitely crowded, but I guess 90% of solutions are one time sales. We focus on solving it from hardware all the way to cloud and keep the it running for them. For companies in services and manufacturing, people on time is a big deal. So anything real-time and actionable is helpful.
Google ads are very cheap for this space because of one time hardware sales most of others companies are focused on. We have a plan to other stuff as well but only after we have the product out of the door.