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This Entrepreneurial Story is about Cheenu Madan who Founded ‘ClinchPad Technologies Pvt. Ltd’ located in New Delhi, India.
About – Cheenu Madan – [Founder] is BE in Information Technology from Delhi College of Engineering (2009) MS in Computer Engineering from University of Florida (2010) and has 1 year work experience at Bloomberg, New York City as a Web Developer for Bloomberg Law (a SaaS product for lawyers)
Social connects – Facebook | LinkedIn | Twitter | Quora
When Started: July 2013
What Motivated you to start your Business?
I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur. As a kid, I used to idolize Bill Gates and dream of building a rival software empire to Microsoft. After finishing my engineering degree from Delhi College of Engineering, I moved to USA to do a Masters degree in Computer Engineering from University of Florida, after which I started working in New York City at Bloomberg. I had a good life, I earned in dollars, was living in one of the best cities of the world but something seemed to be missing. I still had that dream of becoming an entrepreneur. Last year, I decided to quit because I knew I could work all my life but with each passing year, it would become harder and harder for me to take the leap. So I decided to just do it, quit my job and moved back to India last year.
Tell us about your Business
I worked briefly on another software before ClinchPad and while we were doing sales for that product, we were using a shared Google spreadsheet to track our leads. However, it was too unwieldy since spreadsheets aren’t actually built for tracking leads. We signed up for a few traditional CRMs but never got started with them since they weren’t too complicated.
We felt that there was a gap in the market for a simple, easy to use, intuitive sales CRM focused on deals rather than leads. Our vision was to service the small and medium sized businesses by providing them a CRM that is ideal for small teams. We built ClinchPad with a strong focus on a novel UI and a great User Experience
What is a Day in a life of you like?
It varies. Startups are chaos and it is the best way to work. Sometimes I’ll spend the entire day with my head down coding to get an essential feature built and ready. Sometimes I’ll be outside the building pitching ClinchPad to a customer or getting feedback from an active user. Sometimes I’ll spend the day in discussions reviewing our strategies and outlining our action plan. Sometimes, the day gets spent in interviews and hiring. Usually, a day in the life is a mixture of all these.
One particular skill you got right and gave you best results.
We’ve had great success in creating a customer profile for what we believe our early adopters will be. We find businesses and individuals that match the profile we’ve created and reach out to them with a targeted email. The feedback they give us is invaluable and helped us accelerate towards a product market fit.
What have been your biggest challenges in running your Business so far?
Getting feedback was hard. We would get signups but they would then leave and we wouldn’t get any feedback on what they didn’t like in the product. Achieving product-market fit is hard for start-ups initially and the only way to do so is to get lots of feedback. We were targeted at a global audience from Day 1 and so we couldn’t just “go out of the building and talk to customers”. We had to find some way to reach them from the building itself.
How did you overcome these challenges?
We built a strong customer life-cycle management system where we sent specific emails at certain points in the customer life-cycle to elicit feedback. We tried to set up face to face time with our early users via tools such as Skype.
What have you found the most effective way to get new clients?
Build a profile of your ideal user. Find users that match the profile and contact them requesting for feedback on your product. Also, create content that is interesting for your people that match your profile. That is the best way to get signups, feedback, active users and eventually customers.
What advice do you give to other business owners?
Focus on getting as much as feedback as you can from people who actually use your application instead of marketing, scaling and product development. Each and every subsequent feature you build should have been requested by at least two active users.
How did you keep motivated through difficult times?
Remember why I started in the first place and remind myself that persistence the most important quality you can have in life.
Whats Your Marketing, Funding and Team Building Strategy
We’re focused on creating content that our ideal user is interested in. That for us, is the best marketing strategy. We hope to raise a round of funding next year and our team building strategy is to find raw, young talented individuals and give critical responsibilities so that they thrive and grow under pressure.
Your Achievements
We launched a few months ago and in the last month we’ve seen more than 200 signups from which we have a healthy number of active users (we’re a Freemium product)
Do you have a Business Philosophy?
Build ClinchPad into a product that thousands of businesses all around the world will love and build ClinchPad the company into one of India’s most respective software product companies similar to how Wingify, FusionCharts and Freshdesk have done.
Contact Links
website | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn
More Info
https://www.startupfreak.com/clinchpad/
Startup Freak wishes cheenu, All the Best!
