Taking on Giants in the Contact Center Space: UJET CEO, Anand Janefalkar (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How many customers did you raise series A with? How many customers did you raise series B with to net it out?

Anand Janefalkar: I don’t think we have these numbers to share with you today. But before series A, we didn’t have a website. UJET had no website before May 4.

Sramana Mitra: You can have customers without having a website. A lot of companies do stealth mode product development and customer immersion before having a website. Not having a website doesn’t mean anything.

Anand Janefalkar: It means something in our sector when you’re going against companies that are 100 or 1000 times your size. This isn’t a consumer company.

Sramana Mitra: But newer companies can’t work in stealth. Only B2B companies can work in stealth.

Anand Janefalkar: So either way, I think what we wanted to do is go after quality and not quantity. That’s the reason why we didn’t want to spend a lot on putting together websites.

Sramana Mitra: No, I asked you a very simple question. How many enterprise customers did you have before you raised series A? How many enterprise customers did you have before you raised series B? You don’t have to even be specific. Just give me a ballpark. I’m just trying to understand your journey of how you built this company.

Anand Janefalkar: Sure. I think we had a handful of customers. Maybe five or six before series A. What I was trying to say is that we didn’t know, at that point, whether this would be an SMB product, a mid-market product, or an enterprise product. We wanted to find out. The reason why we didn’t build that website is because we wanted to take a couple of customers that were very early on.

These are a couple of customers that had 30 to 40 agents. Then a couple of customers who have more than 200 to 500 agents. So that’s what we focused on and that’s what we got. What we found out during that is that this is designed for a high velocity inbound kind of support model. It’s not for signing up as a freemium service and just have a couple of calls going in, reporting uptime, and all of those. The security aspect of it is appreciated by the high velocity big contact centers. The smaller contact centers don’t care for that much.

Sramana Mitra: You figured out that it was an enterprise product.

Anand Janefalkar: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: You figured out that it was an enterprise product after series A. So at Series A, you were still in an experimental mode with a little bit of customer validation but with positioning not yet sorted out.

Anand Janefalkar: I think we found that out prior to Series A.

Sramana Mitra: This is exactly why I’m asking you these questions. Because I think it is very difficult in our industry to raise series A without getting positioning sorted out. Internally, I was wondering how you managed to do that. But now you’re telling me that you did figure that out before raising series A, which is more consistent with my assessment of how the business works.

Anand Janefalkar: I thought you were asking if we had enterprise customers. The answer back then was no. We had interests from them. But we’d figured that out during this journey. That led to a few things. One is to look for a series A investor that has strong enterprise experience. The partner who will add on the board. Secondly, to position the website in a way that it would be completely disruptive to these mid-markets and above and enterprise customers. So that’s what we did.

Ted Schlein from Kleiner Perkins – I definitely believe he’s one of the top enterprise SaaS investors. He definitely got interested and led the series A. After that, we were off to our races and made sure that when we launched, we already had SOC 2 certifications, which is one of the security certifications bigger companies look for. We had HIPAA certification and that came shortly thereafter.

By December or November 2017, we already were SOC 2 type 2 and HIPAA certified which was a good foundation for us because otherwise you can’t even start to have conversations with bigger companies who are paranoid about security and personal information.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Taking on Giants in the Contact Center Space: UJET CEO, Anand Janefalkar
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