Unifyo is a customer relationship tool which allows you and your team
to have access to rich customer profiles at your finger tips, wherever you go
on the web.
What have you done
before starting Unifyo?
My speciality, while studying Information Systems has been
Social Computing. I did research on how certain functionalities in
collaboration tools support social and psychological processes like group
building. I later moved on to building a framework for entrepreneurs to align
their networking efforts towards increasing the chances of success, developing
a very structured methodology. A bit like Lean Startup methodology, but for
networking.
While I was looking at data, it turned out that you can see
a lot of common patterns in networks of successful people and you can get these
patterns from analysing communication data. So, originally, the idea was
building an application that automatically measures peoples’ networks and
relationships, that keeps track of everything and alerts them when they need to
take action on anything, like building a new relationship with certain people
or keeping up with a relationship that is starting to drop, although it should
be a strong relationship. And that sort of stuff.
Sounds pretty well
thought, did you have a product that time?
Our project was called Handy Elephant. What it did is, it
grabbed your text messages and put your contacts in order, like when was the
last time you have been in touch with someone. It also indicated the channel
used. As a results you could visualize, when the best times were to follow up
with a contact and what the preferred channel was to reach out to someone. It
was also integrated with CRMs, so every time you received a phone call, it
prompted you to take a note and sent that note to the CRM in real time.
How did you go about
monetizing this?
It quickly turned out that the project did not have a very
good route-to-market strategy and also the market was not very good for us. We
were hoping to cater to SMEs but we got most interest from corporates. We had a
great chat with the Head of CRM of PwC, but ultimately they would not buy from
us because we were a very young team.
What happened next?
So we had to pivot and ultimately came up with Unifyo which
we launched in July. The concept is more aimed to SMEs that tend to be really
bad with data integration. They have customer data flowing around, email and
twitter and social media and CRMs and finding information about a certain
person is a complete waste of time. So we designed Unifyo as an intelligence
layer on top of their existing applications that brings 360 degrees customer
data to their sales people.
I was surprised how
easy it is to install Unifyo.
That was actually one of the design maxims we had. It had to
be really easy to use. Anyone in the business should be able to start and adopt
it. Even a low level support guy should be able to work with it.
How many users do you
currently have since the public beta?
We now have some 200 businesses trialling it and we have
quite few individuals as well. We are now starting to see first users
converting into paid. But it is still a very manual process. So what we plan to
do during the next 12 months is streamline the self-service experience and
enable people to not just technically but also socially spread it in their
organization.
Many employees also
have private dealings with the customers, how do you convince them to share
their interactions with their collaborators?
The basic principle here is that everything in your work
email account sort of belongs to your employer anyway and everything should be
work related. So the general assumption is, that you can share it. Unifyo is
also careful in terms of what data it shares. It will share that there is a
particular person you have sent an e-mail to, but it will not reveal the
content of that e-mail to your co-workers. Unifyo makes sure that everybody in
the organization is aware of who knows who and when was the last contact and it
brings this data proactively into the tools as you browse.
How big is your team
at the moment?
We are three at the moment but we want to raise it to six or
seven people in the future to get more stuff done.
If you would like to
give on piece of advice to other entrepreneurs out there, what would you tell
them?
I think the most important advice in the UK is to get out of
the building. Especially first time entrepreneurs in their very early days,
they don’t know, should they tell others about their idea. Yes, you need to,
because you need to get that feedback and that reality check. Similar situation
with technical people, they think they build something, then they put it on
hacker news or some smart developer forum and people will be amazed and they
will be world famous and it will go viral and that sort of stuff. Which is just
not the case.
Apart from building
Unifyo, what makes you really happy in life?
Connecting smart people is something really fulfilling,
because you are brokering information and expertise in a way. This is really
common in the startup world. You meet people and you get something out of them
and they have some needs at the moment and you then again know someone who can
help them. Getting the world closer together in this way will add a lot of
value. There is no money in it, but it is something that is really fulfilling,
knowing you have helped a person.
If you are looking
forward, let’s say the next three years, what do you want to have achieved with
your startup?
A large number of successful adoptions. If we can spread
Unifyo across enterprises, small, medium and big ones and achieve a very high
satisfaction rating there, then, we have succeeded.
