Brandon Bruce co-founded Cirrus Insight, an all-in-one productivity sales platform that connects Gmail and Outlook with Salesforce. Find out how they grew to having over 150,000 paying users across 5,000 companies and gained up to $12.8M in revenue.

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Topics Discussed in this Episode:

• [01:36] How they came up with the idea for Cirrus Insight
• [04:56] How Brandon knew that his friend was going to be a good business partner
• [07:28] How they managed the transition period before they launched their business and getting their first customers
• [10:53] How they got feedback from beta users
• [14:15] How they got people to start as free users to becoming their first customers
• [19:21] How they decided to launch their product and move forward with their business
• [22:40] What the early months looked like for Cirrus Insight in terms of revenue
• [24:47] How their first hires helped them grow the business
• [25:53] How they developed the traffic and their email list and put their sales model together
• [32:35] How their pricing has evolved from the time they first launched
• [35:52] How they compensate their sales people for their demos
• [39:09] How they prioritized feedback and what to build on the development side and the operations side
• [44:48] What Brandon did that had the biggest impact on his growth
• [46:23] What they look for in the people that they hire

 

Key Takeaways:

• There’s an emotionally stabilizing effect of having another person you can share the roller coaster of building a business with.
• The biggest thing that causes early stage companies to fail is that the founders break up. It is a threat to building a company.
• It’s helpful to have smart people on deck to help with the million things that have to get done.
• Community involvement whether online or in person is key to growing a business.
• The opportunities to hire software developers primarily comes through referrals.

 

Action Steps:

• If you’re in the software or app business, find the marketplace online where people are likely to search and/or gather for product offerings like yours.
• Be active in the Salesforce community and be active in all the boards, trying to answer as many questions are possible.
• Build a customer success team just as you would build a sales team.

 

Brandon said:

“We’ve always known that there’s a risk in the market that a very large competitor could come in and stomp on everybody. So you’re kind of always aware of that and yet you get very used to living with that risk.”

“Dig in earlier to something like this, building something that looks like a snowball and pushing it downhill… Get started early and often.”

 

More from Brandon Bruce and Cirrus Insight:

Cirrus Insight’s Website

Brandon’s Email

Brandon’s LinkedIn

 

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

 

Sponsor link

14-day Free Trial to LeadQuizzes

 

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