3 things I learned helping scale our company to over 250m users

(L-R) Me, Nami, and Alan at Guldmobilen, Stockholm in 2011

When I joined the founding team of Truecaller (a communications app) in the summer of 2011, the company consisted of only Alan Mamedi, Nami Zarringhalam, and Umut Alp (former CTO). I had just graduated from university and was moving back to Stockholm, looking for a job. I first learned about the company when I was writing my thesis.

During my seven years at the company, I’ve watched us grow from 1 million to over 250 million users globally, go from being on the edge of bankruptcy to raising money from top investors like Atomico, Sequoia Capital, and KPCB, and become a fast-growing app. I helped the company launch in more than 15 countries and worked on major partnerships and co-marketing deals.

Here are three key lessons I’ve learned over the years, and I hope they will also help other entrepreneurs.

1. Identifying your users’ aha moments

This is probably one of the most important things I learned working at Truecaller—to understand when a user gets what your product does, how to design that user experience, and how to market it. This is something that a lot of early-stage companies fail to understand, transitioning to growth mode too prematurely.

Virality is difficult to explain and replicate, especially word of mouth. But to understand that, we needed to break down the user journey, understand the aha moments, and identify the factors that actually contribute to growth. Knowing this made it much easier for us to set our priorities and focus on markets where we knew there was already product-market fit.

Also, knowing how your users discover your product/service and what they truly value will help you create a much more effective marketing message and clever positioning.

This is primarily how people discover our app and when they get their aha moments:

2. When to start spending money on marketing and PR

In the early days, before attracting world-class investors, we tried raising capital in Europe. The biggest challenge we faced was that nobody understood the problem we were solving. We were getting a lot of users from the emerging markets, and one of the biggest questions we got from local VCs was, “What about the West?”

One of the proudest decisions we made was to focus on the market where we were growing organically. We simply didn’t have the capital to fight our way into the Western market. We believed that if we solved a big-enough problem and built the best product, the market would come to us. This was a big bet from our side, and I’m happy it paid off!

3. Crucial things to get right when launching in a new market