Aydin Mirzaee details the rapid revenue growth at Fluidware after shifting the bootstrapped survey startup to serve enterprise use cases.
Insight
Adding niche features to generic SaaS tools alienates mass-market users
“The difference is if you, as a generic tool built all those specialized functions, it would become really, really difficult for everybody to use. So you actually alienate your other users. So you're kind of in this circumstance where you have to cater to one m…”
Insight
Fluidware found early product-market fit through Canadian government accessibility guidelines
“It was like, we had product market fit as a survey tool built for the federal government, not because our software was so great, but because it met these accessibility guidelines that nobody else met at the time.”
Insight
Mass-market SaaS companies culturally struggle to pivot to enterprise sales
“The challenge is like when you're an everybody tool and you don't have enterprise in your blood it's a different way of being, right? Like you're doing sales driven motion... And if your company culture is a certain way, it's not easy to change your company cy…”
What-if
Googling competitors would have stopped Mirzaee from launching Fluidware
“Had I searched on Google to see how many other survey tools there were, I would have told like my other co-founders that, Hey, we probably shouldn't do this because there's like. 10 pages worth of search results of other online survey tools.”
What-if
Early VC funding would have blocked Fluidware's initial $625K public-sector niche
“I think, like, if you had invested in Fluidware, you would have told us you're not allowed to do that. Like, let's do the math here. So, 25,000 times 25, what is that? Like, you know, 625,000? Like, that's your whole market? Like, you're doing all of this for …”
Disclosure
Procter & Gamble purchased 5,000 seats from bootstrapped startup Fluidware
“I think our, like the customer that was, we were the most excited about and our largest one at the time, It was Procter and Gamble, and they bought 5000 seats, like 5000 seats for, like, one customer”