From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You really wanted to go very cheap and with no administration kind of model.

Anthony Smith: Right. These small businesses don’t have a lot of resources. More to the point is that employees within those companies don’t sit in front of the computer all day. They go off and do their own thing during the day. Some of them might use a computer for half an hour after they finish the shift or after they’ve finished with a customer. They’re not sitting in front a computer all day and using this software as part of the job. It’s more of an add-on piece that helps them orchestrate some of their activities.

I wasn’t necessarily concerned about the price of Insightly. At that point in time, we were just building it for these four small businesses. I went through four different versions of the software. I built it and then I went and sat with some of the stylists to watch them use it. I got some feedback from them. I then went back to do another iteration. It was good from a user experience design point of view because I’ve never worked with people in those industries before.

Their level of expertise in software was very different to some of the people I’ve worked with. It was good to prove out the software in front of the end users sitting right next to them in a chair, watching them and getting feedback. We spent about six months doing that. We had a great integration with the email side of the business with Google Apps and Gmail and a great integration with Quickbooks. We were pulling out some of the email data and building out the relationships that you can derive from just looking inside of the emails and the email headers.

We use the email system to build out some of the capabilities. Google reached out to me and said, “It looks like you are using our APIs to be able to do some integration inside of Gmail. We’re going to launch a marketplace for third-party add-on tools for Google Apps. We’re soliciting partners to build apps to put them in the App Store. They’ve seen the success of some of the other app stores that were around at that point in time. They decided that they wanted to build one as well.

I decided that that was probably a good distribution mechanism. Insightly was still very much a rough product at that point in time. It was only used by four customers. We certainly weren’t charging any money for it. We managed to be in the Google Apps marketplace almost at launch. Google did a really good job of telling all of their four million customers about their marketplace. A lot of those customers came, checked it out, and a lot of them thought Insightly was a positive offering.

We had around about 35,000 businesses start using Insightly within three months of the marketplace coming online. It became very popular very quickly. Unbeknownst to me, for all of the customers who use Google apps, the top things that they look for in third-party products after they started using the GSuite apps were customer relationship management and project management. Insightly got both of those things. We definitely got the lion’s share of interest from the app marketplace. We sat at the number one position at the marketplace for three months.

This segment is part 3 in the series : From Australia to Silicon Valley: Anthony Smith’s Journey with Insightly
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