Its been exactly an year today, when Scalefusion (almost entirely built working part-time and moon-lighting by our team) was launched in Beta. Must confess, its been a fantastic year what with a lot of new learnings and the often-heard, ups and downs of the journey. At the start of the year, I clearly remember, myself, Arnab (Co-founder) and Abhishek sat over lunch at Brookside (Viman Nagar, Pune) to draw out our annual plan and revenue targets. We had discussed how to scale up our services business 3 fold. Scalefusion featured just briefly in that conversation, where we told ourselves that, we will give it 6 months time to see how the product would fare before setting ourselves any targets to achieve.
Slowly the activity started to pick up and customers feedback, bug-reports and feature-requests started to come in. We started to bulk up the Scalefusion team with full-timers, initially started with 1 then 2 and by end of March we had a 5 member full-time team. Releases too were fast and thick, almost on a weekly basis. These were exciting times, we had many brain-storming sessions deciding the next set of features as that is the key and collaborated that with the feature requests coming in from customers to form our bucket list. Deciding priority was also interesting, as we would keep dialog with our customers and discuss the next set of features with them. Based on what seemed important to most customers we picked up features in priority. In some ways our customers acted as our product managers helping us prioritize features, then we went into the mode of “Code, Test, Ship and Repeat!” We were happy putting a smile on our customers faces. We made it our top most priority to keep customers happy and focus on their success with using our product. It just is way more satisfying when you receive compliments from customers not only on the product but also on your service. Gave us the confidence to ask them for referrals and they only happily obliged. Infact some of our initial customers also became our resellers in different geographies.
By July we crossed 50 paid customers mark, a small milestone that we celebrated with a lovely team dinner. The Scalefusion team too steadily was growing and by August we had 8 full-time members. Abhishek, Arnab and myself besides focussing on our usual items on plate, were managing the customer success and honestly were loving every moment of it. In my opinion great customer support/success person not only needs to know the product well but also requires a genuine interest in hearing out the customer, for that, one needs empathy. Thanks to Scalefusion, we got to explore that side of us.
August to october marked a flurry of activity, where we partnered with Samsung to provide tighter control on the device using their Knox SDKs. We built an enterprise app store to let our customers vend their enterprise apps over the air to their devices. Added multi-admin support, added support for role based access system, built a reseller dashboard to let our partners access the necessary information, amongst others. Our customers still acted as our first-line product managers providing us with valuable insights and voted on what features they would like in the product. As a practice, we built a feature and exposed it to only these select customers, who, then worked closely with us providing the necessary feedback on the user experience. Once we were convinced, we built the feature the right way, we would then expose it to all the customers. We would like to thank all our customers not only for choosing Scalefusion as their Mobility Platorm, but also, for their invaluable support and inputs into making Scalefusion what it is today. We hope to continue this wonderful relationship with them in the future.
Beginning of November marked our 100th paying customer, LiteScape Inc (a Cisco products reseller). Glad to have you on board LiteScape and happy to collaborate with you on some interesting offerings on Cisco phones. We dreaded December/January holiday season, but it has not been as bad as we thought, infact it has been one of the best months so far in terms of customer acquisition and conversion rates. To be honest, this was the month, where as a team we got exposed to the whole “Inside Sales” strategy, though unconciously, we have been following it reasonably well with some common-sense all these months. But thanks to SaaStr, Girish (of Freshdesk), Avlesh (of WebEngage), Paras (of VWO), books like predictable revenue and Steli Efti (of close.io), we have fine-tuned our Inside Sales process and hope to reap the benefits.
What a way to welcome Scalefusion’s first birthday with our 150th paid customer (ActiveDay/Senior Care). This year we have big plans for the product and are focussed on growth, while making sure our customer success and account management teams makes sure that we have 0% churn.
We would also like to take a moment here to thank all the immediate family members of the team for their patience and understanding as to why their son/daughter or spouse is working so extremely hard. We would like to assure them that the team is passionate and focussed on building a world-class product right here in India. We believe that they sure are doing some of their best work in their lives here in Scalefusion. Three cheers to the team!
