How we started a central hub for customer experience for SMB - Story of Cloodot

Hello ! Who are you and what are you working on?

Hi, I'm Haris. I'm the CTO of cloodot.com. You can call it a central hub for customer experience for SMB's.

What motivated you to get started with? How did you come up with the idea?

We started with another B2C idea in the automobile industry, we met with a number of customers learned from them that customer experience was a big part of small

business sales. We pivoted to a B2B product centered on customer experience.

Can you tell us the story of your business from idea to where you are now?

Cloodot—a company we’ve taken from the Small Enfield dealer in 2019 to one of the fastest growing CX companies in India. We started as a reviews company, but that was just the beginning. Now Cloodot is leading the charge to modernize the way business happens locally—powering everything from reviews to messaging and insights.

We started out with the idea from our experience and discussions with our customers from our failed startup and we learned actual problems in the automotive industry , then we moved on to building an MVP.

We acquired our First major customer in the automobile industry. This was Indus Motors and Indus Go. We onboarded 200+ locations on to our product. Our platform grew more customers in the coming months, also in the automobile industry.

What has been your biggest failure or struggle?

We struggled with access to third party API's, many of which were private. But we have access to those API's now, with Instagram DM API pending.

How many hours a day do you work on average & can you describe/outline your typical day?

I usually work for 8 hours. sometimes more when it is required. I start early and after breakfast, we have meeting to discuss todays agenda and the work to be

done, which we will out inside notion.

After a days work we hold a meeting again and review our progress in terms of sales and engineering.

We hold weekly in person sessions to discuss our plans for the next cycle.

And what has been your biggest achievement or success?

Our Biggest achievement to date is onboarding and convincing our first customer to our platform with in first week of our MVP launch.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

Better customer support and we are integrating more channels day by day so that our customers can manage everything at one place and give a better customer experience to their client.

Describe the process of launching the business.

1. Develop a better solution for a problem (pain points ) of our customers.

2. Prototype MVP

3. MVP launch

4.Testing

5.Launch in online communities

6.Talk to users and give them aa 7days free trial

What’s your business model, and how have you grown your revenue?

Monthly Subscription based

What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced and obstacles you’ve overcome? What are your goals for the future?

Being an entrepreneur, you have to know when to abandon a sinking ship. In other words, you have to be quick in evaluating if your present product is sinking to bottom or not. If we had stuck on to two of our previous failed ventures, 'Robobeings' and 'My ride works', Cloodot wouldn't have happened. Fortunately, things are going good with Cloodot now.

Keeping a keen eye on market and adapting to changes fast is something that every entrepreneur has to do to move forward in this fast moving world.

Robobeings - Robotics tutorials and diy kits (design and manufacturing)

My ride works - Services aggregation platform for two wheelers and 4 wheelers. We had actually partnered with more than 50 vendors in and around Kochi! persistency and patience is the key!

Our goal is to reach 10 million monthly recurring revenue with in 2022

Let’s talk about your marketing strategy -- how do you market Cloodot and grow the service?

- Website Organic Traffic

- Paid Traffic

- Website

- Public Market Place listings

- Email Marketing

- Affiliates Marketing

- Influence marketing

- Media/Press/Influencers

- Blogging and Content Marketing

Do you have a model to get product feedback? What’s your favorite way to get product feedback? Did product feedback help you get the results you hoped for ?

Our WebApp have a feedback button in it so we usually get feedback and suggestion through itself.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

If you are an introvert don't be shy to start a company because I'm an introvert.

Who’s your most inspirational CEO or founder?

Elon musk

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

how to win friends and influence people - Dale Carnegie

What’s your advice for fellow aspiring entrepreneur who are just starting out?

If you knew a real problem of a customer and you can give a better solution with your idea talk to them no matter what and build an MVP with in 2 weeks time just launch it give them a trial. it may not be a billion dollar idea or a rocket science but you will get a bunch of customers with you effort.