ClinchPad is an alternative to traditional CRMs and is built for small teams looking to break away from a cluster of spreadsheets to a more organized way of tracking leads.
Our editorial team had an interview with Mr. ‘Kartik Kakar‘; Co-CEO at the India (New Delhi)-based start-up “ClinchPad”.
“ClinchPad” is a web based sales pipeline management software for businesses.
Below is the full interview that we have conducted with Mr. ‘Kakar’ regarding his internet start-up company ”ClinchPad”;
1. What is it exactly that you do and what “ClinchPad” is all about?
ClinchPad is an alternative to traditional CRMs and is built for small teams looking to break away from a cluster of spreadsheets to a more organized way of tracking leads. It believes that the user interaction should be as simple as possible so that it is effortlessly adopted.
It provides a new way of tracking leads by shifting focus from data entry to converting leads into deals. ClinchPad is ideal for all kinds of organizations and is confident that it can disrupt the $18B CRM industry that hasn’t changed its approach much since 2005.
2. When has “ClinchPad” been founded? And what stage is “ClinchPad” currently at?
Our startup was founded in July 2013 and right now we are an early stage startup which has completed product development and is venturing out in the market to seek customers. We have 3 members in our team right now and are aggressively seeking more members to join our team.
More information on our team members can be seen at https://clinchpad.com/about
3. What is “ClinchPad”‘s business model and how does it work?
We work on a Freemium model. Our application is absolutely free to use for managing upto 100 leads. You can enjoy all features and add multiple users.
After 100 leads, we have different pricing plans based on the number of users that have been added to the account. Our pricing plans can be seen at https://clinchpad.com/pricing
4. How did your team meet? And who in your team does what?
The founder, Cheenu Madan was working in New York City with a comfortable job earning six figures. However, he felt unchallenged at his job and always wanted to start something of his own. This led to him quitting his job and moving back to India, where he started experimenting with various ideas.
The idea for ClinchPad came when we were tracking business leads for a previous startup. We struggled to track leads using spreadsheets since they aren’t really designed for it and we could not find any application catering to the needs of business owners with small teams as all the CRMs in the market are targeted at enterprises.
Cheenu currently handles the product development and Kartik takes care of the business growth of the company.
5. What, exactly, makes you different from existing options, what will make your product and/or service stand out in the marketplace? In other words what’s unique about you and what’s new about what you make?
The existing sales CRM are mostly targeted to enterprises. They are way too complicated and the implementation costs a fortune. We are looking to setup a niche for small businesses who feel that current CRMs like salesforce and zoho are an overkill for their business. We offer a simple interface where a business can setup and start using our application within minutes.
6. What is your growth like? And what milestones has “ClinchPad” achieved so far?
We started off with spending some money on a targeted digital marketing across Linkedin, Google and Facebook to validate the product and get some signups. Through it, we were able to get 300 signups of which about 25 of them are active users giving us a very good conversion ratio close to 10%. We got our first customer from this batch of active users after the user upgraded to a paid account.
7. Who are your competitors? And what is “ClinchPad”‘s competitive advantage over them?
Our main competitor remains Microsoft Excel and Google Spreadsheets. We offer a scalable visual interface for a company to manage business leads. We are especially built for small teams who are seeking lead management with team collaboration.
One of the biggest advantages that we have over them is the visual sales pipeline view that we can offer them for managing their sales pipeline.
8. What obstacles did you face and how did you overcome them?
Our two big challenges today are 1. Building a product that convinces small teams that they can manage business leads more efficiently using a simple, easy to use CRM instead of spreadsheets which get unweildy after awhile and 2. Distributing the product through a low-touch sales model. We don’t have any sales people as we want to focus on our core competency which is tech. However, most CRM companies usually have a huge salesforce to push their product. We are betting on the consumerization of the B2B space and the differentiation we provide compared to other CRMs to achieve this goal.
9. What are the key things about your field that outsiders don’t understand?
Almost every business needs a sales CRM at some stage of the other. usually businesses wait till their team size is large for implementation but what we are trying to change is that a company can start using sales CRM from an early stage. This will help them evolve at a much faster rate.Our target audience is startups and companies with small sales team who have limited resources can cannot afford to spend too much time with CRM tools.
10. Why are you going to succeed?
It is a niche segment that has been overlooked for some time. We believe that there is tremendous potential to grow as we ourselves have experienced this pain in our career so far. As mentioned earlier, since ClinchPad is ideal for all kinds of organizations and is confident that it can disrupt the $18B CRM industry that hasn’t changed its approach much since 2005.
11. If “ClinchPad” succeeds, what additional areas might you be able to expand into?
We would be focusing on adding additional features within our application. Our goal is to make our application a complete tool that can be used by sales teams of any business. We will also offer integration with other CRM products later on.
We are looking at the growth chart of salesforce and realize that once they had established a niche, they grew to enormous size. This is our insipration.
12. Why did you choose this idea and concept to build “ClinchPad” based on?
The idea for ClinchPad came when we were tracking business leads for a previous startup. We struggled to track leads using spreadsheets since they aren’t really designed for it and we could not find any application catering to the needs of business owners with small teams as all the CRMs in the market are targeted at enterprises.
13. What have you learned so far from launching your idea?
These are still early days, but so far we have received tremendous response from our audience. We are continuously improving our product and what we have learnt is that best way to improve is through customer feedback. Another learning has been that an application or product is never complete, it is a continuous process of improvement that makes any product or application perfect.
14. Six months from now, what’s going to be your biggest problem?
Our biggest problem may be incorporation of additional features as required and demanded by our customers as we will do our best to satisfy their demands.
We may even get some challenges with scalability as we have not yet handled a large customer base, so it will be a learning curve which we are eager to get to.
15. What’s the benefit for the customer/user?
A business can spend more time closing deals rather than spending time in tracking, data entry, and reporting. A manager or company owner can get a complete view of the entire sales team using our application.
There are several other advantages that we have, most of them are listed at https://clinchpad.com/features
16. How did customers / users find out about you?
We are trying to build a low touch sales business model aiming to grow organically. We are focusing on building quality content for our website blog. The goal is to make our blog into a repository of resources which will be useful for any business. We have started with a paid search campaign as well across Google and Linkedin.
17. Who are your current customers / users? Who are your target customers / users?
We have several businesses who have started using our product and they are located throughout the world. We have users from US, UK, South Africa, India, and several European countries. The size of the companies using ClinchPad varies from freelancers to businesses with 5-10 members in their sales teams.
18. Where do new customers / users come from and what makes new customers/users try you?
We reach out to small businesses inviting them to connect with us. We get new users from multiple sources now- our paid campaigns, our blog, network outreach, media coverage, etc.
the most success we have had is through our content outreach program which has enabled us to get quality users for our application.
19. What do your customers / users say about your product and/or service?
So far, we have got positive feedback from most of our customers. They all like the fact that our application is simple to use. Also, we are quick to implement whatever improvements they suggest so they like our customer service. We also get accolades on the structure of the application and the fact that we have all the features required by a sales person.
20. How are you going to scale?
We are targeting growth from international audiences which we are achieving through our marketing campaigns. Along with expanding customer base, we are also looking to increase the size of our core team and make it development heavy so we can focus on making a good product which can be used by businesses around the world.
21. What’s the biggest missing feature? The one thing customers/users keep asking for?
Mobile applications are a must and have been requested by a lot of our users. We have already started work on them and will be launching our iPhone app within the next month. A lot of our users also request for an API for collecting leads from their website. That is another high priority for us and we will be completing that within next month as well.
22. Are you going to internationalize? And if yes how are you planning to expand your start-up’s operations accordingly?
We are already targeting international markets through our campaigns. We are a cloud based SAAS application so operations and scalability is not an issue. We had built our application with international markets in mind.
Once we have a large customer base, we may require more people for customer support and we have already planned for that phase.
23. How big do you think you can get? Why? And how you are planning to achieve your goals?
We have tremendous growth plans, we intend on reaching 100 paid users by March 2014 and then will seek funding. Hopefully, we will have built a globally respected product company out of India similar to what companies such as Wingify, Freshdesk and Kayako have achieved.
We hope to reach that stage faster than what these companies have takes since our product is being targeted to international markets from the beginning.
24. Are you looking to hire a new workforce? And if yes, what job vacancies do you currently offer and where can potential applicants contact you at?
At this stage, we are looking to hire a full stack web developer for helping with application development and we are also looking for a content person who can help write blog articles for our company. We need enthusiastic people who are eager to work in startups.
More details are mentioned on https://clinchpad.com/careers
25. Are you looking for partnership opportunities or funding from Venture Capitals (VC) or other funding sources? Or your business is self-sustainable? And if the first option applies where can potential partners / investors contact you at?
Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.Although we have received plenty of interest from VC companies. At this stage, we are focused on product development and increasing our customer base. Once we have a core customer strength and a good established product, we will seek VC funding to aggressively grow in our target markets.
Till that time, we are bootstrapping the project and hoping that some of our customer revenue can be invested back into the product.
