A thought leader guest post from local serial entrepreneur Ryan Huff: 

Cirrus Insight Origin Story - Part 4

In this series, I’ve written about Cirrus Insight’s origin story, starting with the original idea, bringing on my co-founder, and running our beta.

This final post on the origin story is the payoff. Our launch!

Pricing

Before we could launch, we needed to decide on pricing. These were the days before Product Led Growth strategies had been widely promoted, and we weren’t going to do some complex conjoint analysis. But we had been asking our nearly 1,000 beta users for feedback on different pricing strategies. The approach we took was simple:

1. Beta users thought of our pricing relative to either Salesforce ($125/user/month) or Google Apps ($5/user/month). We didn’t want to be pegged to Google’s pricing, so we had to position ourselves relative to Salesforce.
2. We wanted cash up front for cash flow but didn’t want to scare people away who wanted to pay monthly. We decided to offer both monthly and annual pricing, discounting the annual price enough to entice most people to choose that option.
3. A 30-day trial for software in our space was pretty standard, but we felt that the app was simple enough that it didn’t justify an entire month. We offered a 14-day trial.

We decided on $9/user/month or $99/user/year. We probably could/should have priced it higher (e.g., 10% of Salesforce’s price: $12/user/month or $120/user/year). But we also didn’t want people to have to think too hard — buying Cirrus Insight should be an easy decision. It also turned out that it was priced low enough for sales reps to buy it themselves, and we wouldn’t have to worry about long sales cycles.

Launch Promotion

Again, we wanted to recoup our investment as quickly as possible, so we decided to light the fuse with a special launch offer:

• Only for the “first 500” people to sign up. This established some urgency.
• The guaranteed lowest price we would ever offer: 60% off for life. Double down on urgency.
• Only valid on the annual subscription. This got us cash.

Free for Salesforce partners

Another program we established at the outset was to offer Salesforce consulting partners free licenses. I’d seen this strategy work well with Conga. Giving away its product to Salesforce Consulting partners ensured that the people implementing Conga were well-versed with the solution and made it a nearly automatic install for every client of a partner’s. Cirrus Insight didn’t require consultants to...

Read the rest of this article at fractionalfounders.tech...

Cirrus Insight Origin Story series:

Part 1: The "Lightbulb Moment" and identifying the problem
Part 2: Validating the Idea, Scoping the MVP
Part 3: Bringing in help, Running a beta program

Thanks for this guest post to Ryan Huff.

Ryan Huff is a startup founder with over 15 years in B2B SaaS, with experience building and delivering products in CRM, Sales Enablement, Sales Readiness, Natural Language Processing, and e-commerce. Ryan's started and exited 3 companies, including Cirrus Insight which grew to over $12M ARR and over 70 employees. Today, Ryan is a Partner at Fractional Founders, a management consulting firm specializing in helping tech startups and small businesses overcome growth-related challenges.

Photo by Andy Hermawan on Unsplash

Want to share your advice for startup entrepreneurs?  Submit a Guest Post here.

A thought leader guest post from local serial entrepreneur Ryan Huff:

Cirrus Insight Origin Story - Part 3

In the first two posts, I covered the “lightbulb moment,” validating the idea, scoping the MVP, and starting to code.

In this post, I describe when I realized that I needed help and how we got to the point of launch.

Bringing in help

Up to this point, it had been a creative problem-solving exercise and coding. Fun stuff! But as soon as I had other people testing the early extension, the full scope of everything that lay ahead hit me… Not only did I have to build the app, but I was starting to realize all the other things that needed to be done to get this app out to market — not to mention supporting it and growing it.

There are some people who can do it all. I can code and I’m competent in a lot of other areas, but I think this is just too much for one person to worry about all at once.

If you truly want to create something new and bring it to market,
you’ll do it faster with a partner.

I go into more detail about how and when to select a co-founder in the post above, but I’ll keep it simple here: I was fortunate enough to have Brandon Bruce as one of my best friends. Aside from being smart and as eager to start something new as I was, he works harder than anyone you’ll ever meet. I’m not kidding; it’s exhausting and exhilarating.

Brandon and I had always shared the ambition of starting a company together and had taken a couple of shots at it during college (including a wine.com killer 😂). And importantly, he and I had a complementary set of skills: I was more technical, and he was more “salesy.” As I was still knee-deep in coding and we had a growing group of users playing with the app, we decided he’d do everything outside of coding for the moment, including getting a website up and handling incoming bug reports.

Running the beta

Once we had a (really bad) website up, we created a mailing list, and we started expanding our list of users invited to try the app. We still kept it to Salesforce consultants and MVPs, but we didn’t ask anyone to keep it a secret. We would send out...

Read the rest of this article at fractionalfounders.tech...

Cirrus Insight Origin Story series:

Part 1: The "Lightbulb Moment" and identifying the problem
Part 2: Validating the Idea, Scoping the MVP

Thanks for this guest post to Ryan Huff.

Ryan Huff is a startup founder with over 15 years in B2B SaaS, with experience building and delivering products in CRM, Sales Enablement, Sales Readiness, Natural Language Processing, and e-commerce. Ryan's started and exited 3 companies, including Cirrus Insight which grew to over $12M ARR and over 70 employees. Today, Ryan is a Partner at Fractional Founders, a management consulting firm specializing in helping tech startups and small businesses overcome growth-related challenges.

Photo by Pavel Danilyuk

Want to share your advice for startup entrepreneurs?  Submit a Guest Post here.

A thought leader guest post from local serial entrepreneur Ryan Huff:

Cirrus Insight Origin Story - Part 2

The previous post describes the “inception” of the idea behind Cirrus Insight and how I developed the problem thesis.

In this post, I’ll describe the first steps I took to validate the idea, arrived at our first MVP, began coding, and finally gave this thing a name.

Idea Validation and MVP Definition

I had an idea and could articulate the problem I was trying to solve. But I knew that I might be bringing in my own unconscious biases, and I needed to see if other people thought it was a good idea as well. I knew many Salesforce consultants (Scott, David, and Jon, to name a few, not to mention Brandon, who was at that time, just my BFF from college), and I put some rough Photoshop mockups together to illustrate what I had in mind.

Initially, this trusted group of consultants (let’s call it an advisory group) was small — perhaps only six people. And while I gradually expanded the group during this stage and up to our eventual beta release, this small group of advisors was sufficient to understand the needs of 80% of the users we would initially target.

As long as it’s representative of your target audience, a small group of users allows you to iterate quickly without facing diminishing amounts of unique feedback.

I spent weeks showing the Photoshop mockups to the advisory group and listening to their feedback. They suggested features I hadn’t thought of, gotchas I needed to be aware of, and go-to-market channels I hadn’t considered. As I iterated on the mockups, a vague product roadmap began to take shape.

I made a risky mistake here. While I collected feedback from Salesforce consultants that represented a lot of Salesforce customers — I didn’t ever try to speak directly to the expected customer and get first-hand feedback. Obviously it worked out, but it was an unintentional missed step that could have had costly consequences.

Minimum Viable/Sellable Product

As feedback started rolling in and I started to understand the pattern and theme of that feedback, I began to understand the priorities of our advisory group. All the ideas coming in validated my idea and proved that there were a lot of possibilities, but it was important to get started (and launch) ASAP — after all, I was still paranoid that someone else was working on this idea.

Defining the scope of the MVP was critical. One important factor was that this needed to make money; I was funding this on my own. So not only did this initial launch have to be viable, it needed to be...

Read the rest of this article at fractionalfounders.tech...

Thanks for this guest post to Ryan Huff.

Ryan Huff is a startup founder with over 15 years in B2B SaaS, with experience building and delivering products in CRM, Sales Enablement, Sales Readiness, Natural Language Processing, and e-commerce. Ryan's started and exited 3 companies, including Cirrus Insight which grew to over $12M ARR and over 70 employees. Today, Ryan is a Partner at Fractional Founders, a management consulting firm specializing in helping tech startups and small businesses overcome growth-related challenges.

Photo by Medienstürmer on Unsplash

Want to share your advice for startup entrepreneurs?  Submit a Guest Post here.

A thought leader guest post from local serial entrepreneur Ryan Huff:

Brandon Bruce and I started Cirrus Insight over 10 years ago.

I was the CEO and managed Product and Technology on a day-to-day basis from Irvine, CA. Brandon was the COO, handling Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support from Knoxville, TN. We helped companies make the most of their Salesforce.com investment by bringing their CRM into the Inbox — and we were doing it before it was cool.

A few milestones:

• We bootstrapped the company to over $12M ARR,
• We were on the Inc 5000 List 3 times (#41 in 2016!),
• We were the highest-rated app on the AppExchange for several years,
• We topped out at over 70 employees while I led the company,
• We acquired four companies,
• We exited to a private equity firm

When we started, we knew nothing about building and running a company. We certainly didn’t know how to support an application that would get millions of requests daily.

This will be the start of a series of posts about how we figured out a solution to problems, one by one, day after day, every day. And the mistakes we made along the way.

The Idea 💡

Back around 2010, a company called Rapportive was started. It had the clever idea of bringing LinkedIn into Gmail, giving it a home on the right side of the inbox. They had one of those mythological startup stories where someone “accidentally” and unknowingly launched before they meant to… By morning, they had over 10,000 new users.

I found Rapportive a few months after its launch, and I noticed that I was using LinkedIn a lot more as a result. I was running a Salesforce.com consulting practice at the time, and I just thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if that was Salesforce?” ⚡️

I did some research and couldn’t find anything like this (it might be hard to believe that given the number of solutions like this today but in 2011, it was true). And so I just jumped right in and started coding!

Just kidding. I sat on the idea for months.

It seemed like such an obvious idea that if it wasn’t already around, someone had to be working on it. I would do another search a month or two later, and then...

Read the rest of this article at fractionalfounders.tech...

Thanks for this guest post to Ryan Huff.

Ryan Huff is a startup founder with over 15 years in B2B SaaS, with experience building and delivering products in CRM, Sales Enablement, Sales Readiness, Natural Language Processing, and e-commerce. Ryan's started and exited 3 companies, including Cirrus Insight which grew to over $12M ARR and over 70 employees. Today, Ryan is a Partner at Fractional Founders, a management consulting firm specializing in helping tech startups and small businesses overcome growth-related challenges.

Photo by Kvalifik on Unsplash

Want to share your advice for startup entrepreneurs?  Submit a Guest Post here.

Thank you to Shofeur Inc., a renewing Member of the OC Startup Council!

Shofeur Inc. is a SaaS-based marketplace for chauffeured limousines, party buses, and group vehicle rentals. They are a marketplace that aims to do two things for this industry, which is to market for limousine/party bus businesses and rid of outdated affiliate fees many of these same businesses are suffering from.

Shofeur is the industry's first, all-in-one solution that makes the reservation process simple for renters, while also streamlining and automating businesses' day-to-day operations. 

OC Startups Directory Category:

• E-Commerce & Marketplaces
• Mobility & Transportation

(Get a listing for your company or organization in the OCSC Startups Ecosystem Directory here.)

Welcome to Shofeur Inc., a new Member of the OC Startup Council!

Shofeur Inc. is a SaaS-based marketplace for chauffeured limousines, party buses, and group vehicle rentals. They are a marketplace that aims to do two things for this industry, which is to market for limousine/party bus businesses and rid of outdated affiliate fees many of these same businesses are suffering from.

Shofeur is the industry's first, all-in-one solution that makes the reservation process simple for renters, while also streamlining and automating businesses' day-to-day operations. 

OC Startups Directory Category:

• E-Commerce & Marketplaces
• Mobility & Transportation

(Get a listing for your company or organization in the OCSC Startups Ecosystem Directory here.)

Welcome to CloseHack, a new Premium Member of the OC Startup Council!

CloseHack is a technology company that builds software for the real estate industry.

Their products include: Custom IDX Websites, FlexCRM, QuickTours (Marketing Automation), and The Social Center (Back Office Communication).

OC Startup Ecosystem Directory Category:

• Advertising
• Real Estate Tech
• Software

Contact: Daniel Nix, CEO / Founder - (424) 325-0643 - dan@closehack.com

http://closehack.com

Thanks to CloseHack for investing in Orange County and supporting the OC Startup Council!

Learn here how your organization can join the OCSC, too!

Hazime is CEO of Prodoscore, a startup that enables a company to see real-time productivity data from a sales team and their key applications like the phone and sales or CRM system.  

They’ve seen a big surge during the last 6 months as sales teams have mainly been moved to remote, distributed home offices.

She's leading a growing distributed team and "eating her own dog food" at Prodoscore.  They talked about that a lot on the show when she recently joined Carey.  Prodoscore also closed a Series A round of funding in May. Troy Carter, famed investor and entrepreneur, led the round.

Denise was previously Chief Revenue Officer of VIWO, one of the first Google Apps for Business providers, so she’s been in the cloud business application world for awhile.

She's clearly a good writer, too, as a multi-time author and member of the Forbes Business Development Council.

And like Carey, Denise is a Midwest transplant to Southern California, as she grew up and spent a long time in Michigan.

Thanks to Accelerate OC show host Carey Ransom for another interesting episode promoting Orange County startups!

Listen to more episodes of the Accelerate OC Podcast here.

Orange County startups are hiring!

Check out these new local CRM functional solution architect, BigData engineer, Maximo consultant, and QA analyst job opportunities:

• AKA Enterprise Solution - Dynamics 365 CE/CRM Functional Solution Architect (Remote) - Newport Beach
  Microsoft Gold-Certified Partner for ERP, CRM and Azure 2019.
• ITCO Solutions, Inc. - BigData Developers/Engineers/Architects - Costa Mesa
  A global technology services and management company specializing in cloud computing, workforce solutions and managed services.
• LoanSnap - Forward Deployed Engineer - Orange County
  Invented the world’s first smart loan technology that uses artificial intelligence.
• Microdesk - Maximo Consultant - Irvine
  A technology consulting firm providing technical services for successful planning, design, construction, operations and maintenance of land and buildings.
• CoreLane Technologies - QA Analyst - Santa Ana
  An innovative, fast moving technology company that provides high-speed lanes of information and business flow between automotive retail and finance.
• Lykuid - Chief Technology Officer (CTO) - Costa Mesa
  An infrastructure monitoring platform that provides users a faster, more efficient way to "keep revenues flowing".

Click on these new Orange County startup job postings to learn more!

See more OC tech startup job listings here.

Is your company hiring in Orange County? Submit your job listings here.

CRM and Artificial Intelligence 

This two-part interactive discussion will cover Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Artificial Intelligence.

Join them on Wednesday, April 24 from 5:30PM to 9:00PM at The Yellow Chilli, 7850 Beach Boulevard, Buena Park, CA 90620.

What to expect:

Part 1 - How the best run companies make their CRM work for them

An interactive discussion on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems for marketing to and acquiring new customers, retaining and growing current customers, collaborating with partners and making the channels work for you.

Successful businesses invest in people, systems and processes that turn marketing to lead generation machines, move deals through the pipeline, improve win rates, more predictably forecast demand, identify and quickly address problems before they get out of hand.

If you are a business leader growing your business, you will take away insights to help prepare for and proactively manage growth, so it does not overwhelm your business and you as a leader.

Part 2 - Artificial Intelligence

An interactive discussion on why we need AI, how we can apply it to our businesses, the typical jobs related to AI, which are the most powerful AI companies, the benefits of AI, and what to expect in 2019.

Speakers and panelists include Ramana Metlapalli, Jerry Hartanto, and Basker Krishnan.

Promo: Get a discount for Early Bird registration before April 17th (limited to first 30 registrants).

Please register here to attend.

Thanks to TiE SoCal for hosting this event, the details, the discount, and the graphic!