Long Bootstrapped Journey into Cutting-Edge Generative AI: Jeff Kuo, Founder of Ragic (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Were US customers adopting your product in 2015?

Jeff Kuo: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How were they finding you? What did you do to get found?

Jeff Kuo: In the beginning, we tried to do some online marketing without any money. We tried to go to Quora or Stack Overflow and other forums and post blogs whenever people asked questions about database systems or CRM systems. We tried to chime in and say that we have this wonderful little product that you can try if the big CRM solutions don’t fit you. You can spend a little time to learn how to build a customized CRM system and ERP system to help your current situation. Most of our early traffic came from these kinds of online self-promotion.

Sramana Mitra: Was there any commonality in the customers who were engaging with you? Like, who needs to build a CRM system from scratch or an ERP system from scratch?

Jeff Kuo: In the beginning, there’s no commonality. So a lot of times, customers asked us, “What kind of customers usually use Ragic? What is your main industry?” A product like a no-code platform is usually just everywhere. It’s like, “What kind of companies use Microsoft Excel?” They’re just so spread out.

And that’s definitely not a good thing for startups, because, you know, if you have a vertical, it’s easier for you to have a Salesforce to try to sell this kind of solution, but if you don’t have a base vertical or a very targeted TAM, it’s definitely harder for you to start selling this kind of software.

That’s a very big problem when trying to sell this kind of product in the beginning.

Sramana: So, if I were advising one of our companies to do what you were you were doing, like, you know, validating a no-code product, I would come up with use cases where I think this would be meaningful against certain verticals, against certain horizontal situations and go promote in the places where those kinds of people hang out. Did you do any of that in the validation phase?

Jeff Kuo: Yeah. We do ask our mentors and that is true. The go-to solution to you don’t have a vertical is build a solution on a vertical. But the problem in our building a solution in a vertical is that you must have expertise in that vertical.

Sramana Mitra: I’m not saying to build a solution in the vertical, but if there is a use case that you have in mind where if a customer built a solution in a particular vertical, it would do well for such and such reason because of certain features and functions of the product, then you would go market in that vertical and try to get customers to adopt your product within that vertical, and they will bring the domain expertise.

Jeff Kuo: Right? But, the problem with that would be that, first of all, if we were selling them as a no-code platform, and then it means that they have a vertical solution, but usually they don’t. So it’s just hard for them to start from scratch and build a database system. It’s just a lot more work than adopting a package software. Even though they don’t need to do the coding, they still need to kind of build up the solution. It’s just a lot more work for them to build.

Sramana Mitra: How did you go to market then, given all these dynamics? You must have got traction somewhere as you have survived for a long time as a company.

Jeff Kuo: You notice that was 2014-15. We were a small scale for so long. It took us a lot of time struggling through all these years. So, we tried a lot of things. We tried an outbound Salesforce, which didn’t really work for a no-code product like ours, because we don’t have a vertical, we don’t have a very specific TA that we could really use our outbound sales team too. And we tried to make vertical applications, but it’s very hard to build a vertical application to compete with an existing vertical product.

In the end, we mostly did inbound marketing. What actually worked for us is that we just marketed the product as it is.

Sramna Mitra: A no-code platform.

People are looking for all kinds of solutions to solve their problems. In several cases, those CRP standardized solutions don’t really solve line of business application problems. That’s why so many companies hire outsourcing companies to build applications for them. And outsourcing companies’ quotations are very high. That’s when they try building some solution on their own.

Sramana Mitra: So that’s where you found the sweet spot.

Jeff Kuo: Yeah, mostly, a very high percentage of customers are referral. Our growth is not like a hockey stick. A lot of our customers are referral, and we don’t get a high amount of internet traffic or assignments every day because they know exactly what they’re looking – a CRM for certain thing, but we’re a no-code platform. They need a tool to make the application themselves.

Sramana Mitra: Okay. Now, we are talking 2014-15, and you are doing all your lead generation through inbound marketing to people looking for no-code platforms to build custom solutions. Did that go-to market strategy change, or do you still use that same go-to market strategy?

Jeff Kuo: Our go-to-market strategy kind of evolved because we now have a little bit more resources. So, we spend a percentage of our marketing budget on Google AdWords and Facebook ads. We spend a little bit more on online advertisement and some testing to make sure that our conversion rate is right and the recovery time is short enough so that we can make sure that every dollar we spend, we know how many months we can get by. Since we’re a bootstrapped startup, we always try to keep the company profitable.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Long Bootstrapped Journey into Cutting-Edge Generative AI: Jeff Kuo, Founder of Ragic
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