Tools for

early startups
Tips and learnings from Exotel's experience
ontents
C

Introduction

Tools for

Sales 3

Marketing 7

Social Media 14

Customer support 17

Finance 21

Team Management 22

Design 24
Introduction
An emerging economy like India sees an average of two startups registered every day. The
startup ecosystem in India is believed to be the 4th largest in the world, right after Israel and is
expected to grow by a significant margin by the year 2020.

While being an entrepreneur looks lovely and glamorous from the outside, it is not everyones
cup of tea. Building something from ground up requires something more than just talent and
capabilities. With only 24 hours in a day and about zillion things to get done, efficiency is of
paramount importance.

Life at Exotel was pretty similar too in the early days. 3 techies came together to build a world-class
cloud telephony platform. But the resources we had were limited. At one point, the same people
were building the product, answering customer calls, making sales pitches, fixing bugs and what
not.

What came to our rescue were a bunch of fantastic tools that we used. Not all of them were free.
But we learned to prioritise and get the most out of every tool we used.

This eBook offers a quick peek into all the tools we have come to rely on at
Exotel and have used over the years to sharpen our capabilities across
verticals. We will tell you about every cool feature we found and used,
every neat hack tried and the success (or failure) at getting the tasks done.

The idea behind this is ebook is not give you idea on how you can use free tools. But to take a
step back and help you identify the kind of tools youre going to need and give you options and
tell you whats worked for us.

Were giving you a glimpse into the early days of Exotel and how we grew.

@exotel 1
Tools weve covered in this ebook

@exotel 2
Sales
Selling is one of the first challenges that every startup has to cross. While getting those first few
paying customers is about networking and selling within your circle, there comes a time when
you have to start casting your net wider.

It is important at this point to have a process and tackle sales in a method-

ical manner.

When we hired our first sales person and started selling Exotel actively, we had to start thinking
about a sales process. One of the starting points of this process was making sure we had a clean
record of our customers and our prospects. We used to maintain our this database on Excel
sheets. It worked just fine for the first 50 clients or so. At this point, the team grew and so did the
number of salespeople in the team. Excel sheets started failing us.

CRM
We wanted a CRM that would be a repository of information about all our customers. If someone
at Exotel wanted to know something about a customer, all they had to do was to look them up on
our CRM. Wanted it to be a place that held all the answers.

So, heres what we were looking for:

Fantastic APIs (automation was a big part of what we were trying

to do)

Easy on the pocket (early stage startup, of course)

Easy to customise (we wanted it to be ours in every respect)

Scalable (of course we were going to grow)

We considered a bunch of CRMs, but we finally went with Pipedrive.

@exotel 3
Paid (with a 30 day free trial)

Pipedrive was a natural choice for us because of their APIs.

As mentioned earlier, we wanted a robust Customer Relationship Management system that

provides information on everything we need to know about a client. With this in mind, we
pushed a lot of information to Pipedrive.

This a list (not an exhaustive one) of information we pushed to Pipedrive:

Customer information (the person who signed up for the account)

Comprehensive information about the company

Exotel usage details - calls, SMS, logins, etc

Recordings of all their conversations with Exotel

A copy of all the email conversations we had with the client.

A proper record of the activities done with the client and a list of the
upcoming events to be done with the client.

Information about the deal status

One of the coolest hacks we built on Pipedrive was when a customer signed
into their Exotel account; they could pick a time to talk to his account
manager. We integrated Pipedrive with Google calendar to enable it to
book a slot on the account manager's schedule and add a task to Pipedrive.

@exotel 4
We also did a lot of custom coding to ensure a smooth transition of account ownership from the
sales person to the account manager once they finished their free trial and paid up.

Other tools we evaluated -

Salesforce, TeamGate, Zoho CRM, SalesJunction.

@exotel 5
Tools for customer conversation
Exotel is primarily an inbound company. So, we have an inside sales team that talks to every
customer who signs up for the product. And obviously, we use Exotel to make these calls. But since
were covering Exotel under customer support tools, we are not going into the details here. But
one of the things you have to figure out is this -

What is going to be your

primary method of communication
with your customers?

You can choose phone calls, emails, chat, or even all of the above. But you need to have one go-to
channel of communication. The tools you will need to use will also depend in large part on that
decision.

@exotel 6
Marketing
A great product is nothing without great marketing to back it up.

Im sure someone has said that. If not, were saying it now. The right kind of marketing is essential
for the success of a startup.

The advantage that tech backed startups have is we can support our market-
ing with data. Strike that, our marketing has to be backed by data.

Im sure a lot of people outside the tech startup world have never heard the term A/B testing. But
the cardinal truth is that you can only improve what you measure, and you cant track what you
dont measure.

So, when it comes to tools for marketing, lets get the usual suspects out of the way first:

Freemium

Our website is hosted on WordPress. We have a paid theme that we have customised. The reason
we picked WordPress is that we are a content-centric company. It made sense for us to have our
website on a platform that was easy to customise and edit for everyone across the team. Word-
Press is easy to use and doesnt have a steep learning curve. There are also a lot of plugins you can
use (free and paid) to customise the WordPress experience. All of this makes WordPress a no-brain-
er for lean teams.

@exotel 7
Free

This is the most basic tracking mechanisms every website should certainly have. I dont think Ive
met anyone who has a website but isnt using GA. Google Analytics is the most fantastic free tool
because it gives you a tonne of information that you can act upon. It tells you where people are
coming to your website and what theyre doing. Even if you never master all the complicated
reports available on Analytics, the basic reports give you enough data to work with.

For example, this is one of our favourite screens to look at every day

This is Google Realtime and it tells you how many people are on your website currently and what
theyre doing. Its a fantastic tool to understand how users are interacting with your site.

@exotel 8
Free

When youre a small team, it becomes necessary to share resources, documents and everything
else that you may need in your everyday job. We swear by Google Drive and it does a fantastic job.
As I mentioned earlier, we are a content-centric company. And Google Drive (with sheets, docs,
etc.) makes it very easy to collaborate. We use it for writing, note taking, storing documents, and
sharing. It is a very convenient way to even work across teams.

We even wrote the content for this book on Google Docs. The process of getting inputs from the
team and getting the final edits done was a breeze on docs as well.

Suggesting (like track changes in Word) is one of my favourite features.

@exotel 9
Freemium

No one is above a silly grammatical error or a typo. While Google docs, Word, etc. offer a basic level
of spell checking, we always need more when were writing for a larger audience. And, not every-
one on the team has the same level of writing prowess.

Enter Grammarly. Its the best thing for writers since sliced bread. Even the free account offers a
through screening and is a great tool to have. One of our favourite things about Grammarly is the
fantastic weekly report you get.

Other tools you should check out: Hemingwayapp (fantastic editing tool).

Paid

Kissmetrics is one of the pricier tools we use. And its also one of the best tools available to under-
stand your users behaviour.

This used to be Kissmetrics tagline:

Google Analytics tells you whats happening. KISSmetrics tells you whos doing it.

This is the most accurate description of Kissmetrics and what it does. You can track the actions of
every single user on your website. You can track user behaviour based on events and tie it back to
your product purchase and usage pattern. For products with a free trial period, you can track very
valuable information on what your users find helpful on your website, what theyre doing during
the free trial period, etc.

@exotel 10
Every company that signs up for Exotels free trial is assigned a score based on how they found us
and their interaction with our product and website. This is called a marketing qualification score.
(We will talk about this in detail at another place because this a vast topic in itself ) Kissmetrics
helps us track user behaviour that is used as a part of the score.

Similar tools you can check out:

Mixpanel, Flurry

@exotel 11
Freemium

We offer a free trial of Exotel for 15 days for users to test the system completely before making a
decision. We need to use this window very effectively to wow the customer by showing them how
Exotel can change the way they do business.

As a product, Exotel can be daunting because of the vastness of its capabilities. There is an entire
range of things Exotel can do. To make this a little easier for our users, we set up a drip email flow
that introduces aspects of the product that is relevant to their business based on what they want
to do during the trial period. For example, if they are interested in setting up an incoming call
centre, we send them information related to that and some case studies on how other companies
have used us for the same. We also help them with targeted information on how to use the data
from their Exotel account.

To set up this drip-email system, we used MailChimp. It was a good way for us to communicate
with our customers and understand their needs better.

@exotel 12
Paid

Intercom is a tracking and a communication tool. It helps us track and understand customer
interaction with our product. It also a simple point communication tool that helps with in-product
messaging, chat and emails.

When we started using Intercom, the intent was to track user behaviour
inside the product and use it to send event-based messaging. Since we tracked
all of our user information on Intercom, we decided to run a small experiment.

When we did an a/b testing with our MailChimp account, we figured that the delivery rates and the
open rates were better when sent via Intercom. The main reason for this is that emails sent from
intercom landed in the "Primary" tab of Gmail rather than the "Promotions" tab.

So, we have now moved away from MailChimp and use intercom for our drip emails.

@exotel 13
Other tools you can use -
Aweber, Sendgrid, Mailjet.

Social Media
Social media is one of the most efficient ways to connect with your customers, whether it is to
flaunt a win, brag about a milestone or offer support. Plus, it is the fastest way to connect with
hundreds of potential customers at once to showcase what you can do for their business.

So, we did an audit of all the social media profiles out there, and we zeroed in on Twitter, Facebook,
Google+ and Linkedin.

Twitter was a natural choice because it was the medium that everyone on the
founding team was on. Facebook worked because it was an effective medium
to build a viral effect and get brand Exotel a lot of eyeballs. Google+ worked
because of SEO. Linkedin was necessary for us as a company.

@exotel 14
Obviously, posting on separate media profiles was not only time- consuming but also left us lurch-
ing in the dark about what exactly was working on various platforms.

So, in came Buffer. esting (like track changes in Word) is one of my favourite features.

Freemium

Buffer, the now ubiquitous social scheduling app, was a good way to integrate all our updates in
one place and at one go. We stuck to the free account, but even that made our lives infinitely
easier. We only had to decide what we wanted to go out and when, and Buffer would take care of
it for the entire day. Sometimes, even two days, since the free account allows up to ten updates on
each of our four identified social media profiles.

What we like best is that Buffer offers valuable insights into how our posts are performing on each
channel, across a single dashboard.

@exotel 15
Free

As mentioned earlier, Twitter is our social media platform of choice because everyone in our
founding team and the core team are on Twitter. We saw this medium as an excellent space for
forging relationships and interactions with other people in the startup ecosystem.

However, Twitter on the web has limited capabilities. For a more user-friendly experience, Tweet-
deck is the tool of our choice.

How it works:

Tweetdeck allows tracking of terms and hashtags relevant to your industry. Its also designed to
allow the tracking to be super-easy by bringing it all together on one interface.

@exotel 16
Other tools you can look at for social media management:
Hootsuite, Echofon, Seesmic, CoSchedule (particularly useful if you have a
content platform).
Here are some more marketing tools weve tried over the last 5 years. But arent going into detail
about:
WebEngage, Visual Website Optimiser, Qualaroo, Survey Monkey and Dropbox

Customer Support

Paid (with a 15 day free trial)

For an early-stage startup, it is important to be accessible to customers. An open channel of

communication with your customers is one of the most essential things you need to establish
when youre figuring out product-market fit.

At Exotel, we believe in eating our dog food. We are one of the biggest users of Exotel.

For an early stage startup, here are a few ways in which Exotel can help you:

Gain customer confidence:

Even when we were working out of a home office with 5 people doing all the jobs, our customers
never knew that. When they called us, they were always greeted with a professional IVR that asked
them to select the team they wanted to talk to and connect the call to the right people. In fact,
even today, for the number of customers we serve, we have one of the smallest customer success
teams ever. This is possible through the right kind of automation and having a clear IVR is the first
step.

@exotel 17
Establish product-market fit:

We used to have endless conversations with our early customers to understand their feedback on
Exotel. These discussions helped us understand what we needed to build vs. what we had built.
We always used Exotel for these conversations because the recordings of the calls were accessi-
ble for later use.

System Monitoring:

We set up automatic alerts that would trigger an SMS and a call to the team if there were any
issues with our website or the product. If there were usage spikes that crashed our systems, we
were able to respond even before our customers realised the problem.

Typically, people use their mobile phones to handle customer calls in the
early days of the company. Exotels features capture all the typical loop-
holes of handling customer service on a mobile number - call misses on the
cell phone, missing a call record of your conversation or feedback from
your clients.

While the points mentioned above are mostly right for early stage startups but those of you who
have a few customers (say, 10-50 paying ones), Exotel opens up a lot of possibilities.

Using a centralised system to talk to customers allows you to

Monitor calls for quality

Use real customer conversations to give feedback to the team

and train them better

Understand agent productivity

Track call patterns and figure out your busiest times

Gather customer feedback

Integrate calling into the core of what you build - apps, website,
etc.

Improve operational efficiency by maintaining SLAs, not missing

calls

@exotel 18
If you run an e-commerce or logistics startups that have a field workforce as well, you can improve
your operational efficiency to a great extent:

Safeguard customer privacy by anonymising their phone

number

Do COD verification calls before delivery

Delivery status notifications

Proactive customer communication on order status

Proof of communication calls by delivery person in the case of a

failed delivery

We have scaled Exotel over the last 5 years to the extent that we now handle almost 3 million
customer conversations every day.

USP of Exotel:
Well-documented Rest APIs, 24x7 support, detailed usage reports and call analytics.

@exotel 19
If youre an early stage startup, come and join the Exotel Startup Pack family. The idea behind the
startup pack is to support startups with minimum resources and help them explore the power of
telephony.

Paid (with a 30 day free trial)

While phone calls were at the crux of our customer support, we wanted to offer email support as
well to supplement it. To begin with, we used Gmail to manage all support queries. Not surprising-
ly, we soon realised that it was impractical to try to scale on a mailbox. Thats when we started
looking out for a helpdesk software.

The early days were, well, the early days and so we couldnt afford FreshDesk for more than one
dedicated agent. When short on cash, always do jugaad. We paid for one user and came up with a
bunch of hacks to make it work for 5 users.

We used "tags" with usernames of all our support people (which was pretty much the whole team
at that point) to measure things like Service Level Agreements. It wasn't the most accurate way to
work, but we made it work for us.

At the peak of our jugaad, we even tried to build features like gamification of support using Fresh-
desk (it comes with freshdesk when you pay for multiple users, but we sought to do this outside
the system).

Freshdesk eventually shut us down, and we had to pay for multiple users. But the good things is at
that point; we were able to afford multiple users!

We use Freshdesk to measure the following for our support function:

1. SLA
2. Agent productivity
3. Resolution of issues

Other tools for ticketing:

Helpscout (we love their blog), Zendesk, Desk.com, Groove (we love their blog,
too).

@exotel 20
Finance

Paid (with a 30 day free trial)

When we started out, we had one admin person maintaining our balance sheet manually. Natural-
ly, it took up a lot of time and effort, and we were looking for ways to automate this.

Around the same time, Quickbooks launched in India. Their APIs impressed us, and we were their
first customer in India.

We use their APIs extensively and have managed to automate the entire bookkeeping process.

Team Management
When youre less than 10 people in the startup, you dont need any tools to keep the team in sync.
All you have to do is stand up from your seat and yell, and thats exactly what we did for a long
time. But as we grew rapidly, the yelling business wasnt practical.

@exotel 21
Freemium

We wanted a software for project management. We need to keep track of the pending tasks and
know who was working on them to ensure we did not duplicate tasks. One of the first tools we
tried was Asana. We spent a fair amount of time integrating Asana into our daily process.

One of the best features of Asana was that we could look at a calendar
month and see how much we had achieved over the entire month. It gave
us a sense of accomplishment and kept us feeling appreciated.

But, over time, we kept adding tasks on Asana but did not follow through on the status. The work
was getting done but we werent updating the status of the tasks. So, one day, when we looked
at Asana, it had become a dumping ground for tasks. And the number of open tasks we daunt-
ing. While this is not a proud thing to admit, we abandoned Asana because it was past the point
of fixing.

Even after we abandoned the tool, for a while, we had the illusion of everything going fine before
we realised that the chaos was back.

@exotel 22
Freemium

After Asana, we tried Trello. We still use Trello for a bunch of team activities.

Trello is a good way for us to keep track of things like roadmaps as it has a very visual representa-
tion of the task. It is also very simple to categorise tasks and know exactly what everyone in the
team is working on. The user interface provides a visual dashboard to brainstorm ideas virtually
and display your thoughts in a stream.

For example, we use Trello to manage our content calendar.

Its a great way for us to visualise our content pipeline and know exactly what whos working on.

@exotel 23
Free

The marketing team currently uses Basecamp to keep track of our tasks and our roadmap of tasks.

The most useful feature for us is the Daily check-in. At 5 pm every day, every person in the
marketing team does a small update on the day they had. This particular feature supports the
idea of keeping the entire team informed and involved without the need for micromanagement.
Also, a remote working member is never left feeling isolated with this regular check-in feature.

Other tools:
Wrike, Quip, Smartsheet.

Design
Designers are always a scarce resource in any startup. In fact, they are almost a luxury. For a
company like Exotel that was built by a bunch of engineers, we survived without a designer for the
longest time. Two tools became our absolute favourites when we didnt have a designer.

@exotel 24
Freemium

Not enough can be said about our love for Canva! Canva is one of the easiest tools to use. It has
umpteen templates to help someone without any background in design lay it out fairly well.

Even today, we use it extensively to make quick graphics for our blog and social shares. Unsplash
and Canva are a formidable combination.

@exotel 25
Free

If youre looking to build an entire website that has basic functionality, you can do so without any
tech or design background. When we launched exotel.org, we used Weebly to create the entire
site. It came together in less than two days.

If youre looking to get something set up quickly, Weebly is a nifty and able tool.

Freemium

One of the tools that have helped us immensely is Noun Project. It has a bunch of icons you can
use for free if you pinky promise to credit the designer or just pay a small amount and buy an
account as we did!

@exotel 1
26
Parting words

Just having a very good idea will not be sufficient to catapult you into the success zone. You
should always be on the lookout for tools and tactics that will strengthen your plan and widen
your reach.

Hopefully, after reading about our journey and the kind of tools that have helped us, you have a
better idea of which ones fit best with your current approach and plans.

Some gyaan from us:

Frugality is a great trait to have. If there is a free tool and a paid one, even if
the free one has 90% of the features of the paid one, use the free tool. Penny
saved is a penny earned.

There is a particularly great tool that you want to use but the price is above your reach. In that case,
just write to the company. We have done this loads of times. We have written to people and asked
for a startup discount if we felt like the tools were priced too high for us. There are only two things
that can happen - they can say yes or say no. If they say no, you at least tried.

If youd like to bounce off some ideas with us or just have a chat,
drop us a line on startups@exotel.in.

@exotel 27