Long Road to Product-Market Fit: Allan Wille, CEO of KlipFolio (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What did you learn? What were the key levers that you learned to push or look to push at that point?

Allan Wille: I think the obvious one was that our revenue was simply not growing. That was the one that was staring us in our face. We did have some successful customers, and we had heard that they relied on and loved our product. However, the rest of the model was just too difficult. Every time I chatted with other CEOs, that was the sense I got. Sometimes people are polite, but I wasn’t certainly hearing the yes.

The reality was that this business was not on the right track. The next big external influence came when the iPad was launched. This is in 2010. We’ve been growing now for nine years. It’s tiring. Salaries have not been great. This is a long journey for us. In 2010, the iPad comes out. All of a sudden, a couple of our customers said, “We really love your product, but we want you to consider a few things. First of all, we don’t want to work with IT anymore. Can you put this on the cloud? We want to make sure that it doesn’t just run on desktop. It has to work on mobile.”

I thought this was funny at the time but it was really important. They said, “Can you make the product less expensive?” Of course, a customer would ask for that. Here’s the brilliance in that. What they were saying was, “Make it so that I don’t have to work with procurement. Make it easier to buy.” This really influenced us. What happened was that with all the doubts that our current business wasn’t growing the way it should and with all this input from customers that they would like to see it changed in the delivery gave us the strength to completely rearchitect.

I think we needed both of those things to jolt us out of the current track. I think those influences exist. I think entrepreneurs need to be very cognizant of them. You need to be out there and you need to be listening. You need to be talking to people a lot with an open mind. That was a real change for the company.

Two years later, we launched a cloud-based version of our tool with a consumer type business model. It started at $24 a month. It was very inexpensive and very user friendly. We made it work on mobile and cloud with a credit card type purchasing model. We had done all the things that our customers and the market were suggesting.

It was hard because it was a shift in our technology and it was a shift in our direction. It was an admission that what we had been doing before, we probably did for a little bit too long. We had our blinders on for probably too long. That’s the difficulty.

Sramana Mitra: I think the most important input is the market input. It sounds like you got a very clear mandate from the market that you need to shift gears. 

Allan Wille: Absolutely. I remember discussions. In hindsight, moving to the cloud and mobile, an easy business model makes a lot of sense. It wasn’t crystal clear. In hindsight, I can tell you it was the right decision, but it was difficult at that time. As soon as we did that, we started to get immense traction. Just like before, people found us. We increased our SEO game. It’s something that we still do really well.

Within the first year, we had 350 customers. I was amazed because it was easy. It felt like it was moving. Within the end of the next year, we had 1,100 customers.

Sramana Mitra: These were paying customers?

Allan Wille: That’s right. These were paying and happy customers. We have close to 7,500 customers today. If you find the track, it will pull you.

Sramana Mitra: That’s the secret of product-market fit – finding the zone where the product clicks in gear and people understand the product and what problem is solved. At this point when you found the product-market fit, what was the product? What were people using it for?

Allan Wille: I guess that’s as important to this story. We’re very focused on helping small and midsize business owners and managers better understand the most important metrics inside of their business. We’re a real-time cloud-based dashboard vendor. As you can see, that has been the consistent trend throughout our entire journey.

Right from the start, we were always a real-time dashboard. Many things changed to make this happen. Today, we are helping thousands of small and mid-sized companies feel that they’re in control of their business and understand which metrics are important. There’s definitely an education component to that. We often get relied upon on helping entrepreneurs figure out what they should monitor. Once they’re monitoring their data, help them understand that this is a good metric or that is a bad metric. If this metric is going too far to the left, you should step off the gas.

Today, it’s being used for a huge variety of different departments and use cases from monitoring your marketing activities, program spend, social activities, to your sales numbers. It’s a platform first and foremost that can bring in multiple different data points and then visualize that information so that it is useful to a business owner or a business employee.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Long Road to Product-Market Fit: Allan Wille, CEO of KlipFolio
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