36:8 Discover what makes your agency different

Lee Jackson:
Welcome to the Agency Trailblazer podcast. This is your host Lee on today’s show. We have the one, the only it’s Mr Yash Shah from Clientjoy. How are you today, sir?

Yash Shah:
I’m doing amazingly well. How are you Lee?

Lee Jackson:
I am doing pretty good. Just the stress this morning of trying to get all of my technology started. It was a little bit stressful. I’m watching this amber light blinking on and off thinking. C’mon c’mon why, but it did give me plenty of time to make a coffee. Folks, if you don’t know who Yash is, he is the founder of Clientjoy, but he’s come on the podcast today to share his agency journey. We’re going to jump in a time machine in a second, and he’s going to tell us how he got started and we’re going to go through the timeline with him. But before we do that, Yash, I would really love if you could just give us a little bit of an introduction as to who Yash is. So where you’re from and maybe some hobbies, just a little bit of background so that people can get to know you a little more.

Yash Shah:
Sure, absolutely. So, hi guys, thank you for joining in and listening to this. My name is Yash, I’m co founder and chief executive at Clientjoy. I am a mechanical engineer, my education, and then I worked with an investment banker for about a year and a half before starting our IP agency, about five, six years ago. Then grew that agency from three people, founding to about a 50 person team, and then realised that there are genuine problems in scaling an agency and growing any agency. And so started Clientjoy, which helps other agencies solve those problems, identify bottlenecks and identify growth enablers, and do a generally much better job of working with their clients. So that’s a fairly quick introduction of who am I, what my background is. I love playing cricket, which is, which is a sport that not a lot of people play, but yeah, that’s basically why I’m there. I’m from when I’m about.

Lee Jackson:
Cricket here as well, a is practically a religion when it comes to my father in law. So we have a cricket club here and Finedon and he is now an official lifelong member of the cricket club because of all the years of years of service that he gave. And I was just joking yesterday that cricket skipped a generation for, for me and my wife. We’re not really into cricket. So I’ve, I’ve told him that he has the opportunity with his new grandson to get his grandson into cricket. Cause he came and visited just yesterday. I was like, I’m sorry, Richard cricket has skipped a generation, but you always have a second chance.

Yash Shah:
Absolutely and congratulations on that by the way.

Lee Jackson:
Thank you. Before we get into the content then what is it about cricket? That’s so great because I honestly don’t know.

Yash Shah:
Oh, it is a great question. Right? So it’s cricket over here in India is it’s a sport that if you see it on a TV, you’ll really be confused. However, it’s something that you can modify so much that you can essentially play it anywhere. And so that’s something that’s really amazing. The other key thing is that it unites people, right? So, it actually brings people together, typically be a range of any cricket match ranges from between three and a half hours to about 12 hours, on some days. And that’s some, and even to five days later, if you’re playing a test match, but it genuinely brings people together. So these two things that’s, that’s really amazing, right? So the ability for it to bring people together and the ability for it to be modified in such a way that it can be played anywhere you want.

Lee Jackson:
I’m impressed. We used to play cricket as children, and I was the one child who whenever I was got out, whether, you know, whether that’s stumped, stumped me out as the phrase I think is I would cry and cry and cry until they’d give me a second chance. I was not a good sportsman, right? Let’s jump in the time machine then Yash, I would love to go right back in time to when you started your agency. So could you just give us a little bit of background about where you were, what you were doing, who you met and how you decided to launch your agency?

Yash Shah:
Sure Lee, absolutely. So we were basically three friends, we are the founders, me; Abhishek and Anupama and we’ve known each other since school. And so, we’ve studied together and we worked on projects together and we always liked working with each other, however, during our college and after engineering whatever we got on our different paths, we started working in different cities. However, we still wanted to work together and continue kind of as side projects and things that we’d like to build. Just not for full time, but on the side. So we enjoy each other’s company. And so we started essentially with me in Mumbai, doing, working as an investment banker, I’d go out to like really cool pubs and stuff and I’d find standup comedians or small bands are performing over there. And this is I think early 2011. And so I go out and talk to them and ask them, Hey, you know, if you had a website for yourself, you would actually get more queries and maybe you can do paid shows and stuff like that. And you know, two out of five would say, Hey, you know, I’m interested, tell me more. And so I pitched them, you know, we’d build a static website for you, for like $200 or $300 or something like that. I bring those kinds of projects myself, and then Abhishek would design those websites and Anupama would implement those websites and they’d be static websites, not even WordPress, no CMS, no nothing that, and we continued working with each other. And so, but we did that for about five months and we realised that we were actually getting paid more than our full time jobs, and we are able to get enough leaves and we’re able to design enough projects, and we’re able to deliver enough projects and people are happy with the work that we’re doing. And so why don’t we kind of start this as a fulltime activity, right. And then, so that’s kind of how it started, you know, just me, going out to pubs and asking people, you know, if do they want to get a static website done to delivering them and then getting good reviews and getting recommendations and getting referrals through them. So that’s, that’s basically how it all started.

Lee Jackson:
That’s awesome. And how many years was that? Was it just the three of you for several years? Because you mentioned you scaled right up to 50 at some point. So how long did it take you from the three of you naturally growing and realising that actually we can leave our full time jobs for this. How long was that journey between finally making the decision to leave and start for yourselves? And then your first hire beyond just the three of you?

Yash Shah:
Oh, it took us about five months to go from, Hey, you know, this, this looks like something that we could do full time instead of our jobs. So we spent about five months kind of doing it part time, and then left all of our jobs, started doing it full time. Then it took about about a year or a little more than that for it to actually pay us the kind of compensation that we were getting it at jobs. So at the end of five months, the place where we were was it was able to cover our costs, the need. So the basic utilities costs that the three of us had, it was able to cover the cost at the end of 5 months. So we left it, jumped into it saying that, Hey, you know, we not have savings for a bit, but that’s okay, let’s try it out. And then it took us about a year, year and a half to get to a point where it was actually paying us the compensation that we were getting it our previous jobs. And then we had started scaling right up by that point of time. And that was the time when we actually pivoted in terms of what we were offering as well. Right. Because only Anupama out of the three of us was a techie, the other two, I mean, me in sales and Abishek in design, we did not understand tech a lot. Then it took us that much amount of time to also understand that, you know, websites are looked at as commodities. And if we were to offer CMS websites, that might be a lot better than just building static websites and then jumping from that to actually starting to build web applications and mobile applications like building actual software that works. So that also happened during that one, one and a half years. And then, we were able to get the kind of sources, word of mouth was fairly positive. We had started getting inquiries, however, we did not have the manpower to fulfil them. And so by that, by the year and a half after we jumped in full time was when Anupama just raised her hands and said, Hey, you know, this is, this is enough. You know, I am buckling down under the kind of pressure and the amount of work that we have, because actually for us, you know, we were able to close deals a lot faster and Abishek was able to design a lot faster because as and when time passes, um, the amount of design aggregates right. So, you can only design homepages in like 15 different ways if you’ve done 20 projects, then the 21st is going to look like the seventh one. So, so the designs actually started becoming a lot faster. But that’s not the same with technology, especially if you’re doing the static version of the website. Right.

Lee Jackson:
Everything’s a do over, isn’t it in code?

Yash Shah:
Yeah. So you can look at the logic and everything, however, you still have to write it again because the IP has to belong to the client, right. The code IP. So, that was the time when she said, you know, we need more people and so let’s hire. And so we said, Hey, you know, when we started the business, we did not know how, are we going to run the business? And so it took us about a year and a half to figure all the processes out amongst the three of us. And the three of us are friends. Right. If we hire people one, we don’t know how to hire people, what to look for. And second, we don’t know how that is going to work. Right. If we have three more people, how will they able to communicate and collaborate internally? What should be the process? We don’t know that. Right. And so that was when we started with a, with an interesting mindset. So we, what we did was we went out to colleges and institutes over here. Computer science institutes and recruited interns, right. So in recruit like 12, 15 interns and then out of them and so that would be a three month long internship. And then out of them we’d be done. And we ended up recruiting three people. And so the three months of internship that all the 15 people did, that essentially was the interview where we kind of analysed how the candidate was they analysed how the company was and how we were, and whether there was a mutual fit in terms of how do we want to work forward. So that’s basically what we did in terms of hiring people as well.

Lee Jackson:
That makes complete sense. So just before you did the internship, then I can just imagine the pressure on the one developer. Was there any point where you all were concerned that you may have to close and how did you handle that? Cause I imagine there’s three friends. One of your friends has immense pressure on them because of the workload. You’re obviously bringing in sales and you feel a little bit hamstrung because you can’t bring too many sales in because it’s going to put pressure, et cetera. And also your designer is fine because they’re okay. They’re just churning out designs, et cetera, but then nailing the pressure on. Was there any danger, do you think that it could have all fallen apart at that point?

Yash Shah:
So, here’s the thing, right? So the three or four months before we recruited the interns and we had to rather recruit the interns three or four months before that, we started realising that this is becoming a problem because all the timelines that I had to give to the clients were fairly longer than what they were actually supposed to be. And so by that time, we had internally started having this conversation that, Hey, you know, the fact that we are not able to close as many deals, is a good problem to have, we have a very healthy sales pipeline and so on and so forth. And so that’s, that’s kind of the conversation that we had like four months at, at T minus four months. Right. And so that was kind of the conversation that we’re having. And then over those four months, like at the end of it, Anupama was like hey enough with this good problem to have made bit. However good it is it’s still a problem. Let’s fix it. So, that was basically the point where she said, Hey, you know, I’m not just not working on weekends, I’m working in the evenings later in the evenings and it’s just not feasible. And it’s not that we don’t want to do hard work, really want to do hard work and, and it good work, but there’s, there’s a point when a person will burn out. Right. And then, so that’s the point where I am at. And so let’s get people, let’s get more people, no matter the consequences, we’ll figure this out. We’ll figure that out as well but let’s go out it’s. So there was no point where we said that hey no will have to close down the business. However, there was a lot of uncertainty, right? Because if your three friends you’ve known each other, you have great understanding, but that time we had known each other for a decade, right. Because we meet together since school, however, when you have other teams with 50% of the team does not know you that well, you don’t know them that well. And they also knew each other that way. Right. And so that kind of changes the dynamics a lot, because then there are internal dependencies and stuff like that. So there was a period of uncertainty as to how are we going to manage, but never a point where we were either on the brink or even nearing the brink of closure at that point of time.

Lee Jackson:
No, that’s good. I can imagine a really healthy working relationship between directors can break down if one person feels stressed or hard done too. But what I can hear here is that you guys have had a consistently open conversation for many months saying there is a problem. There is a problem. And then when it comes to the point where it’s now essential, the problem gets resolved. You’ve all pulled together to resolve that problem and that is very encouraging. Also, folks, if you’re listening and you are feeling burnt out, whether you’re part of a team or whether you are on your own, but you are getting to that stage where perhaps you’ve got too much work on, you are burnt out. You are burning the midnight oil, as they say over here, or burning the candle at both ends, which is another phrase ie working weekends, et cetera, very long days, I would encourage you to consider getting more help having a lookout there and seeing, alright, let’s find a way to make this work. I’m really encouraged by the way that Yash says, we will make this work. We don’t know how it’s going to work, but we will make it work. And if you do the same thing over and over again, expecting different results, you probably will find nothing will change. It will actually get worse. So what Yash and his team did was they did something different that made an improvement. Alright. Yash, that’s awesome. Now you’ve now grown over a few years to up to 50. And I remember me and you chatting a few months ago now when we were doing during the Clientjoy summit, and you explained to me at one point that you had your agency, but within five minutes, walk of your agency was another agency that did exactly what you did. And this became a problem because you became one of many people who can do what you do. How did you navigate through that and begin to stand out?

Yash Shah:
So that was really interesting. Right? So one of the things, so we’re in, we’re in a city called Amdabul in India and it’s a second tier city in India, however, there’s not a lot of earth of talent over here because we’ve got really great institutes. So what that means is that there’s even a bigger cost arbitrage with, let’s say city like Bangalore and Mumbai, forget cities like Singapore or San Francisco. So there are a lot of IT services companies over here. As I shared with you earlier, there were 1200 IT service companies in the 20 mile radius that we are in. Right, and so anywhere and everywhere, even my building had like seven. So just the office that we were in, there were seven other IT service companies. And so anywhere that you’d go, you’d see a lot of companies that are working in IT and this started to become a problem, right? So when it was just the three of us working, we were working on like two or three projects at a time and revenue predictability was not a huge challenge because, you know, we would not take salary or take salary a little later and that would work out. However, when you have team members and employees or interns, you really need predictability in terms of your revenue, which would essentially translate to having to have predictability in terms of your sales. And so one of the things that started to happen was that almost every customer that we would, or a potential customer that we would talk to who’s looking to build a web or a mobile app. We’d see that, Hey, you know, they are talking to at least three other vendors in the same city with the same advantages that we had. And so it had started becoming very important for us to answer the question that what is our cost is no more the the advantage when we’re talking to a customer, right? Or, our rates are no more the advantage. And so we’ve got to figure out how do we stand from other companies that are offering essentially the same services. So that, again, translated to, instead of offering a new, sort of the saying that we are doing any and every web and mobile application, we actually need to niche down out of market, and it may sound a little counter intuitive that in order to get more sales, you may want to target a smaller market size. However that invariably works, right? So, if you go ahead and say that, Hey, you know, instead of being anything to everyone which actually ends up in being nothing for no one, we started seeing that, Hey, we really are able to help SaaS founders. We are able to build Saas products. And the fact that a SaaS product is not the sum total of the features that it has. And so we started building small little value points in and around our offering, right? Where the act of building the SaaS product, the activity of building the SAS product essentially was this 40% of what we were doing. We started saying that we would help you build your onboarding process. We’d help you with your drip campaigns. We’ll help you with the metrics that you need to measure. We will help you identify the other softwares that you need to integrate with your platform, so that it offers a good experience to your customers and so on and so forth. So the act of building the core platform essentially became about 30, 35% of the work that we did. However, the other things, which was essentially a consultative approach to folks who wanted to build SaaS products, kind of became a larger business over a period of time as well. Uh, that also helped us and in addition to what you also mentioned at the Clientjoy agency summit was was that if you know what your positioning is, and if you know who are your services for, then you know where to go, then you also know where to find your customers, right? And so then we were able to understand that these are the places where our customers are hanging around. Let’s go over there and talk about our offerings. So that was basically the journey that we did and it took us a moment about two, two and a half years to realise that this is becoming a problem for us. Because up until that point, the answer that we gave ourselves was that if our conversion rate is going down, we’ll just product the top of the funnel. And it took us about two, two and a half years to realise that, you know, just broadening the funnel is generally a good thing, but that’s not always the answer. Maybe, reducing the top of the funnel, and along with that refining our offering is, is actually a better answer.

Lee Jackson:
You are absolutely right. The moment, you know, who you’re targeting and what you’re targeting them with, everything else becomes absolutely obvious. So that’s your language. That’s where you go. That’s where you show up. That’s what you talk about with people, et cetera. And that’s so encouraging. And I like what you’ve done there. What you’ve done is recognised that we are building applications. You’ve gotten to a point where you’ve built static sites, you’ve built CMS driven sites and you found that over time, you are commonly building small SaaS products as it were, and recognise that around that you can hone in and focus in on that and provide a range of complimentary services and become a SaaS specialist. We will help you not only build the product, but we have an understanding of the SaaS industry or how to launch a SaaS, or what’s involved with it. We have the following consultative services. We understand the following platforms that you could potentially integrate. We understand how to add value. We understand how to drive traffic to your new SaaS product to be able to grow it, et cetera. So you go from somebody who can simply develop a SaaS product based on a spec, which all the agencies in your building sounds like it could have probably done to the one agency within your building that has the specialism that already understands the process. And that is what they do as a full time job. Therefore, the value that you have to the potential client is much higher versus the rest. How did you kind of learn that? Because I imagine you’ve gone from a general site to competing on price with other people to then recognising that you have immense value. How did you kind of learn the lesson of increasing your prices when you started to focus in, on your niche?

Yash Shah:
So great question. Right. So there were two key things that we had observed, right. One was that whichever client that we were working with while they were engaged with us for a particular IT service or a particular product that they wanted to build ultimately what they wanted was peace of mind. Right? So peace of mind of working with someone that really understands what they want. Right.So that was the first thing that identified as a pattern, that if for some reason, if in some way that we are able to offer peace of mind to our customer, they are more likely to stick around for longer. They’re more likely to refer us other customers and so on and so forth. The first thing, the second thing that we identified was also the fact that if we are working with a customer, and if we are able to position ourselves as more knowledgeable in that particular field, then with the customer that builds significant amount of trust. Right? So, so as an example, if I want to host an event, and if I’m talking to Lee, then Lee will be able to position himself as knowing a lot about how to run events online or how to run events in general. And so that will not just offer me of mind if I’m working with him, but it will also tell me that I’m working with someone who’s smarter than me at what is the service that I’m expecting and what he does in general. So, those two key things helped us in saying that, Hey, you know, what, if this, as an answer or this as a selling point is known to them, not after they actually purchased from us or not after they become our customers, but what if they know this before they become our customers? Right? So what if this becomes a part of our sales process? What if we are able to establish that trust establish, that the knowledge that we have and established the fact that we are able to give peace of mind to our customers before we close them as a customer, that’s basically how the journey of repositioning and rejiggering ourselves kind of started. And by that time, we’d already built web and mobile apps in SaaS and FinTech and e-commerce and we did a number of mobile apps and there was a, there was a big temptation, right internally where we wanted to see that, Hey, you know, we’ve, we’ve worked in so many different industries and we worked in so many different fields and verticals and whatnot. And it was a very hard decision to say that, you know, we’re not going to talk about the eCommerce projects that we’ve implemented, or the FinTech projects that we’ve implemented. You’re only going to talk about SaaS products and we’re actually going to reduce our portfolio. But then we are going to talk a lot more about it. Talk a lot more detailed into it. That was also another difficult call to make. However, the fact that this was a pattern that you observed in all of our previous customers, kind of gave us that push, that we needed.

Lee Jackson:
I think folks listening right now who may be don’t have a niche or feel they are struggling to identify a niche. We can learn significantly from this story right now, you could look at what are you currently working on? What service do you do, and that you offer that you’re very good at, that is in demand. And what can you offer around that service? And how can you flip the conversation? We can hear here from Yash that with his company, they recognised they were amazing at SaaS products and that they had knowledge far wider than just coding the SaaS product. And they flipped the conversation instead of showcasing how good they were to the client once the client had purchased, they flipped the conversation and started sharing that before the client ever became the client. So the marketing message became, we are specialists in SaaS, this is what we’ve done. This is how we can do it. This is what we can do for you. And that’s how they developed their niche. So again, take a look at what products or services you have to offer as an agency. And how can you flip that conversation? What can you focus on and how can you flip that conversation? Because a niche does not have to be an industry. Often people think, I must have to focus on accountants and offer them the full package. What Yash clearly did was found one thing they did really well and then flipped the conversation so that people could start to learn the benefits and the advantages, et cetera, of why you should be working with Yash and his team before they ever became a client. I think it was a really valuable lesson. Now let’s fast forward to Clientjoy. Clearly you’ve been developing apps. You’ve been developing SaaS products for other clients. You came to a point where you decided to do it for yourselves and you launched griddle, which is now called Clientjoy. Tell us that story.

Yash Shah:
We went from, I think, 12, 13 people to a total team of 50. And this was up until early 2019, right? I think January, February, 2019, we were 50 people deep, that was just building SaaS products left right and centre. And as in, when we got more and more people in the team, we also started expanding on the knowledge that we had on building a SaaS product and so on and so forth. And one of the things, however that we had started realising was that the top management was spending a lot of time in managing clients, right. And in speaking to clients and understanding their problems, rather than actually having the company and the team do impactful and meaningful work, that was one key issue. The second issue that we realised was, was that as an organisation, we were using like five different tools and products to work for, for our once client life cycle, we’ll have a sales CRM, and then we’ll have kind of Google drive to create our proposals. And then we’ll use Basecamp and Asana to manage our projects. Then we’ll use Freshdesk as a ticketing system, and then we’ll use QuickBooks for our invoicing and bookkeeping and so on and so forth. And so the client management ultimately happened on email. The other problem that we also understood, which was a consequence of using all of these different platforms was that we were not able to know what our bottlenecks were in our organisation. We were not able to know what our growth in it. So what was it that was working or what was it that was not working was not very clear to us. And so we said, you know, this might be a good time where we reach out to our agency friends and our other peers and talk to them. Right. and understand how did they solve this problem? So we spoke to about 200 people at different designations in 33 different companies and in 14 different verticals, right? So in design services, it services, digital marketing services, even management services and so on and so forth. And one of the things that we realised was here, I mean, this was a problem for them, but they are not found a solution to it. The solution essentially was an Excel sheet. So having one or two people who were just creating Excel sheets all the time to know how the company is performing and how the company is growing or not growing or whatever the reality was for them. And so we said, it cannot work this way. We being an IP agency have faced this problem, understand this problem at the same time, by that time, we’d already built more than 35 SaaS products. So we understand how to build this aspect. We know what are the metrics to measure? What are the softwares to use? We’ve helped 35 customers to go to market. So, if we have the understanding of the problem, and if you have the capability to meet a solution, then why don’t we try building a platform? And we started going along with it. And about six months we had an MVP or a minimum viable product already ready. In February of 2020, we raised a small round of equity financing as well for that product and we started building more and more features on top of it. Currently we sell about 1900 or agencies globally manage their clients through our platform. So that’s basically how Clientjoy started.

Lee Jackson:
So that was all around the same problem you had, which was multiple, multiple applications all into one place. I think for us, we’ve reinvented how we manage our agency content, our process flows multiple times. We’ve gone from application to application. And one of the biggest problems we have only one platform does one thing really well, but might have the limitation of integration. So we were very much a Basecamp classic company many, many years ago, and Basecamp classic, I personally think is still the very best Basecamp because it included time tracking on a per line item. It was easy to understand it was well structured. I do understand the reasons why they changed it over time, of course, to make it easier for clients to understand and to make it easier for you to control what people see. So I get what happened and I get why it changed over time. But once they moved away from Basecamp classic for us, we started to go on that journey ourselves, just trying to work out, right. What do we use for project management? How do we onboard clients? What do we use for our accounting? How do we send quotes out? Because clearly a PDF is not actually the best way of doing things. How do we manage our leads? Our project management system can’t manage the leads. So we’re going to need Salesforce now, perhaps, or maybe something else. We then kind of went on this slow journey of trying to find all in ones or trying to find very flexible third party tools that would all integrate with each other. So that’s been an ongoing journey that we’ve very often struggled with. And we kind of finally found something for a couple of years in a product called Dubsado which I’m not sure if you’re aware of thats dubsado.com and they offered quite a wide range, but they offered for us at least quite limited integration. It was clear that there were certain parts of their application that was weak. They were trying to do all things within the application, which wouldn’t work for us. We couldn’t really use the project management tool within the platform. Everything else was pretty good. The proposal system was pretty good managing our accounts, being able to report and project and see incoming leads and ongoing opportunities. That was all pretty powerful, but the very weak point was things like the project management and those sorts of things, which was a real stumbling block for us and we couldn’t really integrate. Now I understand, again, from conversations that me and you have had is while it’s Clientjoy seeks to solve many of the problems I’ve just mentioned, you’re also avoiding from trying to solve all of the problems. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yash Shah:
So, one of the things that we also learned building SaaS products for other people is that you cannot just build everything. So you cannot solve all problems at once. No matter how big your team is, you just cannot do that. So the aim of Clientjoy. So the way that we define our problem is is that agency owners today are not able to understand their bottlenecks and are not able to understand their growth first and are not able to have meaningful relationships with their clients. Now, if we are able to offer some of the features within the product so that they are able to do all of those things, and at the same time integrate with the tools and platforms that they’ve already used for other features or other specific features, which we know for a fact that we are not never going to be able to build, then what happens is that Clientjoy becomes two things for them. One is that they’re able to use an excellent proposal management system, excellent invoicing tool, excellent payment tracking tool, excellent sales management tool, and then project management is very different for very different kinds of agencies and kinds of projects that you work on because if your average ticket size of a project is a thousand dollars versus $10,000 vs $20,000, your project management looks very, very different, right? And so instead of building all of those things, what if we just integrated with, with ticketing systems and project management systems, right? And those integrations, what happens is that you as an agency owner or a decision maker are still able to use client joy for your sales process and your payments process, and then if they are very specific towards, and platforms that you use, let’s say for time tracking or managing projects and managing your tickets, you’re able to integrate Clientjoy with it. So that client journey becomes your central brain, right? So it, it tells you what’s happening in your organisation. It tells you what are some of the steps that you can take to make it better, or make it more efficient, or how can you implement processes? It does not limit you. That’s the same problem that you pointed out that with Dubsado. Their project management was very, was not suitable for you. You may want to use Basecamp for that, or you may want to use something else for that. And other agencies may have their own preferences, because that is a very wide space. So you cannot have one too, that that kind of is there for everyone. And so we integrate with things like that. So that at least there’s one tool where you’re able to know how your agency’s performing, right? And you’re able to make better decisions. You’ll be able to make informed decisions and grow your agency. So that’s basically the philosophy that we have at Clientjoy.

Lee Jackson:
I like it. So you’re not trying to do all things, but you are focusing very much on integration. So ensuring that if people are going to take Clientjoy, you very much that sales process, which is sales, communication, isn’t it. And what you’ve named the company here is Clientjoy. I get it straight away. You want to create a great experience for agencies, clients. You want the agency to be able to take Clientjoy and have great communication before, during, and after the entire sales process, as well as the delivery. And then importantly, what you’re doing is creating solid integrations an API, et cetera, where people can integrate them into their PM system. So for me, I would be able to carry on with a project management system that I know and love, and then connect the two. So for example, I know people love Clickup in our industry. The reason why people can’t use click up for project management whilst also using Clientjoy to give their clients joy. I know that sounds cheesy, but it’s quite cool. Now you’ve also done something which I consider crazy, but you know, that’s good. I’m fine with crazy. I like crazy people and you’ve gone to AppSumo and you’ve put Clientjoy on AppSumo tell us a little bit about.

Yash Shah:
So, as I shared with you earlier, that really is an equity round of financing in February dates. The company is doing, working on cash. So the purpose is not to generate or start generating revenue right away. And so the purpose, however, is to reduce the amount of time that it takes us to build a product that fits the market right. Now, even though we understand our own problems that we faced and we can do research, and we’ve spoken to a lot of people about it, however, there’s nothing as much powerful as having a thousand people use your product, and then they hate you for it, or love you for it, or tell you what’s wrong with it, or what’s right with it. So, that’s what AppSumo delivers. So we had 200 signups within the first 24 hours. We’d expecting about 10,00 over the whole campaign that we have over there. So what happens is, is that you’ve got these number of people who now know about the product and have signed up and used it and are telling you, Hey, you know, this feature is missing or that is done or implemented incorrectly. You may need to change this, the interfaces wrong this way. This is the best part that I loved in your product, the way that I’m able to move guards in my sales pipeline and would visualise that that’s really amazing. I’d like to have X, Y, and Z. And so what that does is that it reduces the cost of learning on our side. We don’t have to now be great on the product. We have a thousand people giving us requirements that they have to build things on our product. And so they really know that in the, in the campaign that we do with AppSumo like three or six months after that, our product for sure is going for the market because the market has spoken over a period of time. So AppSumo was, was a good way for us to, to actually get agency owners from different geographies and working in different industry verticals and stuff like that.

Lee Jackson:
Folks, you can find that special offer, if it is still available to you, this podcast will go live on Wednesday. So I believe it will be for a few days it’s appsumo.com/clientjoy. I’m more than happy to promote this without any sort of affiliate links simply because two reasons. Number one Yash is a really good friend of mine. We’ve known each other for a while now. And number two, I really believe in what he’s doing. It’s very rare to find a product and a company that have the knowledge and the journey and the experience of Yash and his fellow founders. They’ve shared with us, their journey, a similar journey to what we’ve all been on as agency owners, we start as friends or as a small company, and we take ourselves through that entire process and we discover our niche and we grow our business from that. So for me, there is nothing better than a product that has that sort of background. I fit myself. I’ve been playing around with it. I’m really impressed. Especially since you guys have improved, you essentially launched a brand new interface didn’t you, which is dramatically improved things like the proposal creation, et cetera. And sure there are still, there’s still a journey to go on because nothing can be perfect out of the gate, but importantly, you guys are going in the right direction. So folks, I would really recommend you check that out appsumo.com/clientjoy, or check the notes in the show notes. So, Yash it is about time that we wrap up. So all that’s left for me to do is ask what are the best ways for people to connect with you? And then we shall say goodbye.

Yash Shah:
Oh, I’m a part of the Agency Trailblazer community on Facebook. So just hit me up right there. Or you can reach out to me over LinkedIn. I will share the link with you Lee, and you can link it in the show notes. So these are the two best ways to reach out to me.

Lee Jackson:
Thank you very much for your time. Have a wonderful day Yash.

Yash Shah:
Thanks Lee. Have a wonderful week as well.

Lee Jackson:
Cheerio.

Lee Jackson:
That wraps up today’s podcast. Folks. Don’t forget. This podcast is sponsored by Cloudways. My favourite cloud hosting provider, you can check them out over on cloudways.com. And if you want to take advantage of that special offer with Clientjoy head on over to appsumo.com/clientjoy. Finally, we have a community that you can be a part of over on trailblazer.fm/group. If we don’t see you in the community, let’s see you in next week’s episode.