How We Started A Cloud Testing Platform With Over 200K Users
Hello, My name is Avinash Tiwari. I founded pCloudy in 2015 along with my lifelong friends and Industry Veterans - Pankaj Goel & Lalit Jain. pCloudy is a continuous testing cloud that helps developers and testers test their mobile and web apps remotely on thousands of real devices.
With access to over 5,000+ real devices and browser combinations, the need to set up a device lab is no more a necessity for our enterprise customers. pCloudy prides itself on having a global presence by serving more than 200k+ users from small, medium to large enterprises with 30+ Fortune 500 companies in its kitty.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
The three of us were running a successful Testing Services company that we had bootstrapped in the year 2005 and now has grown to about 300 people. In the year 2015, while interacting with one of our enterprise clients I realized that businesses were struggling to create a world of quality digital experience for their mobile application users. It was around this time that enterprises started going Digital in a big way and the mobile apps market saw immense growth with no end in sight.
The challenge that enterprises were facing is that they were not sure if their application would perform well on different makes of mobile devices, operating system versions, connectivity types, and browsers. Testing across all these factors on real devices was a strenuous task. It was not a good use of a developer’s time to manually test each release and testers found it tiresome. Moreover, it was expensive and time-consuming for the business.
This got me thinking about how we can make testing practices more efficient and help businesses overcome these bottlenecks. This curiosity is what led us to create pCloudy.
We were able to grow to 50K users in the first three years without a sales team only because we offered a frictionless free trial for our users.
Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.
We are a SaaS product. We had a very small but really strong Technical team when we started. We used the Minimum Viable Product approach to do our first launch. If you haven’t heard about Minimum Viable Product or MVP, it’s a development technique in which a new product is introduced in the market with basic features but those features are just enough to grab the attention of its customers.
We researched and found a few critical use cases to launch our MVP and then kept adding to it as we got feedback from our customers.
The MVP technique for launch helped us in understanding our product’s strengths and weaknesses as we got responses and feedback from our customers. This helped us in building a product that is loved by our customers today.
Built a strong online presence on all digital platforms, discovered where our audience is, and just showed up.
Describe the process of launching the business.
Flashback to when it all began. We were a small team of innovative thinkers and dreamers in a tiny office in JP Nagar, Bangalore. We had an even tinier data center, where the three devices that we owned were made available on the cloud for customers to use.
Getting these three devices online was itself a huge challenge as it took our team three days to get them live. Our product didn’t have fancy features back then - users were able to run only manual tests. There were times when things looked bleak and we didn’t know what kind of company we were going to be but we never gave up on our vision to help businesses deliver a superior quality digital experience to their users.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
We focussed on three things to attract and retain our customers
1. Creating a Strong Digital Presence
In today’s world, a strong digital presence is everything. Not only for technology product companies like ours but also for every other company that’s different from us too. It’s known that 97% of consumers search for products and services online. And having a strong presence digitally has helped our prospective customers discover us though they didn’t know that we existed in the market.
A few initiatives that we took to build our digital presence are:
Created a website that’s appealing to our prospective buyers because it’s one of the important sources that people visit to confirm our credibility, know more about us and get a free trial of our product.
Created a social media presence because it’s a necessity these days for brands. It helps in creating trust among prospective buyers and existing customers as well. It’s also a great place to get testimonials about your product from your customers. Currently, we have around 13k followers on our social media pages.
Produced a lot of useful content like webinars, blogs, and newsletters to build our emailing list and also engage with our followers online.
Collaborated with influencers in the testing industry to co-create content that’s highly useful and informative to our community.
Showed up at testing conferences and events conducted by our testing communities to build relationships with our community members and promote our product.
2. Frictionless Free Trial
From inception, we focused on helping our prospective users experience the product in a smooth and frictionless manner. We gave them free trial access using which they can try the product for free and decide on further investing in it only if they found value in it.
Most buyers are reluctant to part with money unless they are sure the product will suit their needs so offering them a free trial helps. Offering a free trial also greatly improves the chance of converting a lead to a customer. We were able to grow to 50K plus users in the first three years without a sales team only because we offered a frictionless free trial for our users.
3. Strong Customer Support
We understand that no matter how good and easy to use our product is, our customers will need help at some point in their journey with us be it pre or post-sales. When our customers have questions or run into trouble with the product, we always ensure that our customer support team is available on live chat to answer their questions and help them achieve success with our product.
Sometimes, when our users face problems that are too technical and not easy to be resolved over chat, we get on a video conference with them and resolve the issue. We also have a FAQ section and documentation of how users can resolve the issues that they face with the product effectively and quickly without the help of the support team. We see every opportunity to serve our customers as an opportunity to retain them.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
We’ve grown and expanded to empower thousands of customers at companies large and small, all while enhancing our continuous testing cloud to heights we never imagined. With a large team of professionals around the world, we work together every day to improve and innovate our product, allowing our customers to run various kinds of manual and automation tests.
Defined by our world-class IT Infrastructure and relentless efforts to serve our customers all over the world, we have Data centers in the USA, Australia, Singapore, Bangalore, and Mumbai where thousands of devices are made available for our 200k+ plus users to access over the cloud to certify their mobile devices and web browsers.
We're proud to call enterprises like Meta, Honeywell, Lamborghini, Dell, Philips, and Jio our customers.
We have also been mentioned in multiple Gartner reports and continue to have a consistently high rating in Gartner’s Peer Insights platform year after year as well.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
We learned that in the SaaS space the growth approach is End-User led growth and Product Led Growth (PLG). We tried this quite early on and learned tips and tricks of the game.
PLG is more of a Go-to-Market (GTM) approach which uses the product to build a flywheel to acquire customers and scale the business. Most SaaS businesses are adopting this model as their growth engine.
So as a business these are a few things that we did to embrace PLG as our GTM strategy:
- Focus on Easy Product Discovery – Built a strong online presence on all digital platforms, discovered where our audience is, and just showed up.
- Made Product User Experience Ridiculously Simple – PLG is all about simplicity, the more easy the UI of our product is, the more fan following it will have. We designed that our users can navigate through without a manual.
- PLG is all about the hands-on experience – We let our users find value in our product by opting for a free trial before investing in it.
- We used marketing automation to nudge and engage our users so that they stay on course. Hubspot is a great Marketing Automation Tool that we use to track our user’s journey to nurture them into customers.
- Track Usage Analytics – Monitoring product usage analytics helped us focus on improving the right features to avoid any energy leakages.
- Excellent Product Support – We Invested in product support that resolves our users’ queries on the go.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
We use the following tools that help in making our work easy.
- Google Workspace - For email, calendar, internal meetings, and record keeping
- Zoom - For product demonstrations, client/partner meetings, and webinars
- Slack - For better communication and collaboration among employees while working remotely
- Hubspot - Track and analyze our sales, marketing, and customer support activities
- Circle - To build our user community
- Jira - To plan, track and release our product updates faster
- Trello - To plan, track and complete our marketing tasks
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore is a must-read book for every entrepreneur building a tech product startup. It’s an insightful read that provides a lot of highly practical and actionable advice.
Hooked, by Nir Eyal is a highly interesting and thought-provoking book. This a highly valuable book for any entrepreneur who is striving to build engaging products for its users.
Masters of Scale Podcast by Reid Hoffman has been a source where I get to continuously learn from each episode. The experiences and insights shared by the hosts and guests are truly remarkable and of extreme value to every entrepreneur.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Being an entrepreneur, we are in a situation where we will have to make a lot of important decisions around our business, and many times we succumb to certain cognitive biases while making those decisions.
We tend to frequently focus on feedback that supports our original ideas and beliefs, ignoring feedback and data that suggests otherwise. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of confirmation bias. To ensure that bias doesn’t creep into our decision-making process, surround yourself with a team that could critically analyze your ideas and suggests better alternatives. It’s also better to rope in your users to give feedback on the product.
Knowing their suggestions and feedback will help us build a product that meets their needs better. We, humans, are hardwired to fall prey to confirmation bias, but these biases prevent us from growing so let’s be careful while making our decisions.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We are currently hiring for a Customer Support Specialist in our team. This role is for our Bangalore-based Office. We are looking for someone who has excellent communication and customer service skills. We expect the candidate to have a good understanding of testing concepts, API, Database, and troubleshooting SaaS-based Applications.
If you are interested in joining our team please share your email at
[email protected] or keep an eye on our careers page.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
