Jum Balea · · 5 min readZendesk CEO gives honest tips on growing a startup: ‘It’s marriage, you stay for the kids’
Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane. Photo credit: Official Leweb Photos.
Silicon Valley’s Zendesk is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. From a scrappy startup in 2007 to a public company valued at US$2.6 billion today, it has come a long way.
The journey was long and painful, co-founder and CEO Mikkel Svane says. “You constantly do things, fall, and get up. Do things, fall, and get up.”
Zendesk, maker of customer engagement software, is now a 1,600-strong force across 14 markets worldwide.
How did it become a multibillion-dollar, cross-border business that competes with traditional players like Salesforce?
Mikkel shares sorely honest insights during a fireside chat with Minette Navarrete, president of Philippine investment firm Kickstart Ventures, in Manila this week. Here’s some:
On growing your customer base…
When you’re just starting, you have no choice but to do all you can to get attention and create awareness about your product, says Mikkel.
Zendesk in its early days put small ads in every channel possible and created tie-ups with other products so they’d write about the software. “We did everything to create noise.”
On making your customers loyal…
“What defines a customer’s loyalty to the brand is if things just work – they’re frictionless, seamless,” Mikkel says.
You have to spot which parts of your interactions with customers cause friction and go back to your product team and remove those parts.
If something goes wrong, he say good customer service would always beat whatever marketing effort you have.
And for startups, customer service doesn’t have to be a luxury. “Main thing here is tech.”
He recalls Zendesk’s first paying clients such as Uber, Pinterest, Dropbox, and Airbnb. “There were only two guys [in Uber] when they started using Zendesk – they started on our lowest US$9 edition. We were working with [many of our clients] since their very early days. They made use of the tech that’s available so they could scale and integrate customer service into their products,” Mikkel recalls.
“They had no marketing budgets and they knew it’s all about managing the experience,” he adds.
On revenue vs profitability…
On getting the right investors and refusing the wrong ones…
On building a product vs building a company…
On hiring globally…
On keeping team culture and dynamism…
On committing through thick and thin..
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