Case Study: Telgorithm's Journey Towards Product-Market Fit Involves "Celebrating Your Successes And Losses"
Celebrating your loss allows you to dissect the key challenges and gives you time to reflect. Honor them and then move on.
Introduction:
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies depend on cloud communication platforms to deliver unique, high-quality customer experiences to their users, but are limited by the structural challenges of APIs across the unified cloud communications stack. The $140B cloud communications market is in need of more flexible solutions.
Telgorithm is a “purpose-built” cloud communications enablement platform that provides compliance-based messaging and voice solutions to SaaS vendors built by Aaron Alter, Mason Zheng and Yury Semerikov.
Executive Summary:
Problem: High-Velocity Growth Has Left Product Managers (PMs) and Go-To-Market (GTM) Teams Behind
The majority of cloud communication APIs and solutions were built for developers first (i.e. developer-friendly), leaving the particular needs of PMs and GTM teams on the wayside. The Telgorithm team had to figure out what those needs were and whether there could be a viable business behind solving them.Market: Product Managers Need A Cloud Communications Platform That Built For Them In Mind
PMs are responsible for defining the roadmap of the new product, services, and subsequent features that need to be launched. Platform solutions that are built with PMs in mind can allow the latter to better serve their customers in the $140B cloud communications market.Solution: Excellent Problem Discovery And Customer Onboarding Helps Telgorithm Delight Its Early Adopters
The Telgorithm team found early success by maintaining unique, dedicated Slack channels for each one of its customers. Although unscalable in the long-run, Slack allowed Telgorithm to quickly onboard and troubleshoot issues. The Slack invitation also invites early adopters into a team environment where they can receive transparent answers to challenges, in real-time.Team: Promoting Group Discourse Allows For Better Decision Making
One of the most important habits the Telgorithm team cultivated is promoting group discourse. Listening more than speaking allows the team to maximize their chances of making the right decision as well as build trust in one another.Takeaway: Celebrating Your Losses Can Help You Find Product-Market Fit
The Telgorithm co-founders said it best: “Celebrating your loss allows you to dissect the key challenges and gives you time to reflect. Honor them and then move on.”
Case Study: Telgorithm
Problem: High-Velocity Growth Has Left Product Managers and Go-To-Market Teams Behind
Tell me about a problem or set of problems that you’ve had to solve on your journey to product-market fit.
Our journey towards finding product-market fit has been through the lens of being a customer of the product and service that we’ve launched for ServiceTitan. For many years, cloud communication companies proliferated from massive demand from SaaS companies. The unintended consequence of high-velocity growth is the disenfranchisement of SaaS companies’ product managers and go-to-market teams to launch mission-critical features easily (e.g., messaging features, voice features, etc.). Imagine doing your taxes without TurboTax. We’re doing just that for GTM teams that want to easily launch cloud communication features.
Our mission started by determining how much effort to launch and support a voice application. We found that not only was it difficult to launch a voice application (sometimes taking 2-3 years to build), but we also found that much had to be sacrificed in the pursuit to offer a voice solution with a partner platform (think Twilio, Plivo, Dialpad, etc.). Many platforms have not been purpose-built for SaaS companies. This leads to discontent with end customers (think SMBs that lean on telephone calls to generate revenue but experience consistent outages). Our recent raise will help us tackle this challenge.
Why were these problems so critical to solve? What was it like personally struggling to overcome these challenges to achieving PMF?
In a nutshell, Telgorithm is a cloud communication enablement platform for SaaS companies. We purpose-built our infrastructure to ensure that our customers never miss a beat. At ServiceTitan, we personally built all of the redundancies and deconstructed the voice platform to ensure high quality and near 100% service delivery. Imagine if SaaS companies had to achieve what ServiceTitan achieved? It is a massive effort that requires hundreds of product, engineering, and design hours to accomplish.
Having been the customer, we built Telgorithm to offer the most out-of-the-box flexibility while allowing our customers to deconstruct the communication stack themselves, if needed. This creates the ultimate win-win-win scenario for Telgorithm, SaaS companies, and end customers. Who doesn’t want ultimate flexibility from a product to make something truly special for the end customer? Think SquareSpace meets Webflow. SquareSpace is fairly rigid but allows you to get your website up and running quickly. Webflow gives creators the ultimate flexibility to reimagine the web experience. We believe in the power of bringing both of these elements together and packaging it for the cloud communication space.
Market: Product Managers Need A Cloud Communications Platform That Built For Them In Mind
Let’s get deeper into the pain point or points you were trying to solve. Imagine I’m a customer thinking about using your product or service. How do you go about understanding my pain and creating a solution to address it?
Put yourself in the product manager’s shoes. You’ve been tasked with replacing the voice solution of your end customer with a product from the Company. Let’s call this the “voice product.” Where do you start? The first step is to speak to the largest players in the space to understand the landscape. You start your discovery journey by calling Twilio, RingCentral, or Plivo, and you begin to scope the MVP-version of the voice product. You begin to write story points and start estimating engineering effort.
The second leg of the journey is understanding how the customer will interact with the voice product relational to the core application (e.g., CRM, reputation management software, etc.). Is it a separate web app? Is it embedded into the core application? Is it a downloadable client? Which would create the best possible customer experience? Also, which one is the quickest to market for revenue activation? Is the quickest necessarily the best? These questions run through a product manager’s mind and begin to cascade into a larger issue.
How do I marry engineering, design, and regulatory issues into a cohesive GTM solution for our sales team to sell without negatively impacting customer experience with existing products? Telgorithm’s platform addresses all of these questions in a solution that unpacks the complexity of building, scaling, and supporting a voice product without the headaches.
Assuming you’ve managed to address the pain points I face as a customer, what additional information did you discover in your journey to PMF that there’s a large market in need of a solution to the existing problem?
The market for cloud communication will be a $140B TAM by 2025. Our voice solution is a sliver of the unified cloud communication stack. We haven’t discussed our compliance-based messaging solution that we’ve already rolled out and is part and parcel of said stack. Holistically, the theme driving much of Telgorithm’s early and continued success is the need for a transparent, accountability, and reliability in a cloud communications provider. That’s us. Horizontal and vertical SaaS companies have shown tremendous resilience in deconstructing the needs of all business types in the US and CA and building new categories of SaaS offerings. As the SaaS industry grows, the demand for our optimization layer continues to grow with it.
How did you narrow your scope of what portion of the market you wanted to tackle first? Who did you decide would be your first beachhead customers and why?
Our company has the technical capability to deliver solutions across the unified cloud communication stack. At our company’s inception, we prioritized opportunities generating disproportionate pain for our customers. For us, it was compliance-based messaging for SaaS companies. We understand that we’re tackling a large TAM, but our maniacal focus on SaaS companies will help distinguish us from the pack. Our compliance-based messaging rollout coincides with the new regulations on ten-digit long code numbers across the US. Customers that are non-compliant face unprecedented surcharges (up to $10 per message) or penalties ($10,000 per complaint). The then-impending compliance changes to messaging created a compelling argument for tackling text messaging first.
Solution: Excellent Problem Discovery And Customer Onboarding Helps Telgorithm Delight Its Early Adopters
How did you build your solution to maximize its relevance with the customer and ensure product-market fit? If you haven't found PMF yet, what have you learned? What are the blockers for getting to PMF?
We’re leveraging UI/UX to overcome the barriers to deploying cloud communication features. This is similar to our approach to developing ServiceTitan’s voice product. We’ve learned that customers want a cohesive experience between the voice product and the core application, which we’re obsessed with. The end-user experience is really our north star.
What are some of the things you did that “didn’t scale” to shape your solution today?
From a GTM perspective, charting out an iron-clad onboarding process remains the largest bottleneck to scale. We’ve learned a lot in the process of lessening the impacts of latency, jitter, packet loss to voice calls by being extremely thoughtful in the discovery and onboarding process. In the beginning, these things didn’t scale because we were still figuring out how we should assess a customer’s network for viability and the best vendor to help us achieve it. Regardless, our pain around discovery and onboarding are just a few ways that shape how we think about the product manager’s journey towards onboarding, success, and support for their communication products (voice and beyond).
What did you learn to best engage with your customers? How did you build a tight feedback loop with your customers to rapidly improve your solution to their problems?
We created joint Slack channels for early customers to maintain a quick feedback loop. Trust is the cornerstone of early customers, so having Slack facilitate communication (instead of email) has allowed us to communicate and align quickly. This path really helped our text messaging product takeoff.
Walk me through how you landed your first few customers as you were building your product or service.
We sourced most of our early leads through warm introductions from investors and previous colleagues. Don’t be afraid to tap into your network to generate a pipeline of leads for your business!
Team: Promoting Group Discourse Allows For Better Decision Making
If you have a cofounder, walk me through a time that you two had a conflict. What was it about? How did you handle the situation? What was the resolution, and how did it impact your working relationship with your cofounder?
We believe discourse leads to better outcomes and decision-making. In terms of conflict, we typically listen more than we speak. Having a genuine curiosity of the other side’s take allows you to explore your potential blind spots. You chose your cofounder for a reason. Allowing your cofounder to bring a unique perspective to the conversation allows both of you to make better decisions (even though one cofounder may have a better internal compass for the best path forward).
What key qualities did you look for in key early hires to increase your chances of discovering product-market fit, and how did you prioritize what types of hires you needed to make first?
We look for people that meet our company’s core values. Although that’s sort of in flux because we’re a young company, we look for individuals that dare to challenge the status quo to be transparent and accountable. Ultimately, it comes down to cultural fit and aptitude for the role. We prioritized engineering hires first because we believe building a world-class product comes first. Once we were confident in the product, we quickly shifted to building a sales team (in accordance with our GTM strategy, which is on the inbound demand gen). We haven’t gotten to our outbound strategy yet, but we believe that an outbound strategy is a great complement to product-led growth.
If there was a potential employee of your startup reading this Case Study right now, how would you convince them that joining your team is the next best step in their career?
We started Telgorithm with one powerful idea: simplify the cloud communications go-to-market and compliance journey for every SaaS company. In our more than 17 years of cloud communications and SaaS experience, we’ve learned that creating an extraordinary product and customer experience is an iterative process that requires maniacal focus. SaaS companies spend millions of dollars and hours to achieve the extraordinary for their customers; this includes their cloud communications stack.
We are passionate about SaaS and telecom. We are growing fast and are looking for hungry leaders that want to make a large impact in the world. We are building an organization that is steeped in cultural and intellectual diversity. Our people will be tasked with solving seismic challenges, supported by an organization that prioritizes employees first. If you find yourself thinking at the end of each day, “how do I continue to delight my customers?” then Telgorithm might be the company for you.
Takeaway: Celebrating Your Losses Can Help You Find Product-Market Fit
What are the key lessons have you learned so far from your journey to achieve product-market fit?
These might come off cliche, but they’re solid: 1) trust your instincts; 2) surround yourself with people smarter than you on topics that are relevant to your company’s stage; and 3) celebrate your successes and your losses. The last one is super important. Celebrating your loss allows you to dissect the key challenges and gives you time to reflect. Honor them and then move on. Always pay attention to your mental health, in addition to your physical health.
What’s the hardest problem you’re facing now after solving the prior one(s)?
Hiring the right leaders to help us scale.
Click Here for Telgorithm’s Founder File:
Telgorithm Founder File Description: Seed Raising from VCs
Building a startup requires grit and resilience, two critical ingredients to get you halfway towards building a successful startup. This is most likely not new to you. The other half requires funding. If you’re in the fortunate position to have to raise from external investors (*sarcasm intended*), then we have a few tips for you.
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Joseph Philips, Founder of Payabli: Payabli is a Payment Infrastructure and Monetization Platform with a core thesis “If you’re a Software Company you’re a Payments Company”.
Eric Ingram, Founder of Swell: Swell is the most powerful headless e-commerce platform for modern brands, startups, and agencies.
Jason Graub, Founder of Tourial: Tourial allows you to create self-guided product stories that educate potential buyers faster and drive quality conversions and pipeline.
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