52 Shots and Startups – #1 - Barista in the Pearl with Chris Miller (christopherdan)
Last week I had coffee at Barista in the Pearl with Chris Miller (christopherdan), founder of Havoc Labs and EnsoCloud. Havoc Labs is a design agency building websites for a variety of customers. EnsoCloud is a CRM service, but calling it a CRM doesn’t do justice. EnsoCloud intrigues me because it has a unique approach to CRM. I think the service has great market potential and a great approach to building a product to address the customer needs.
“Behind every great website there is a great designer” – Chris Miller, Founder
What is EnsoCloud?
EnsoCloud is hosting service that enables agency and freelance designers to build and host dynamic websites for clients with the tools and languages designers know best without help from developers or operators.
How is EnsoCloud different from other CRM solutions?
While most CRM frameworks (e.g. Drupal, WP) are heavily focused on features sets as well as thick developer frameworks, EnsoCloud focuses exclusively on the user experience by enabling designers to build beautiful, highly functional, dynamic websites. I love this approach for two reasons.
First, the target audience is more finely tuned. Instead of having to deal with designers, operators, and developers to build a website, EnsoCloud enables just the designer to build websites. The designer just needs to define the HTML, CSS, and images, and then add markup to the HTML. Once uploaded to EnsoCloud this runs as a fully functional CRM system where the special tags can be used to add contents by the website owner (not designer) without having to worry about breaking the design.
Secondly, instead of building a complex feature rich technology, the project is scoped down and focuses on the key problem. This market in general is incredibly large. Many companies and services are focused on solving the same problem with technologies which are more burdensome than they are useful. Chris is going back to the root problem all the CRM systems have been trying to address for so long, but rethinking it from a different angle altogether: the designer.
What is the most important lesson learned so far?
Get the product out the door.
EnsoCloud re-launched in August. It was first targeted at small shops looking to create website. The service started at $5 per month. It also included a number of templates small businesses could use to build their websites. At first they were struggling making all the decisions about which features to include or punt. After launching the team realized that much of those discussions were irrelevant. They learned that some of their hypothesis were wrong:
The target audience was the small shops wanting an easy website. Turns out that this was a crowded business space. Also the resulting websites were always sub-par. At this point it became apparent that a designer is needed to have a good website.
The price point ($5/month) was way too low. First off, this price was too low for the company to be profitable. In the second iteration more options were given starting from $19/month. Turns out that when given numerous options most customers skipped the low-end prices and went right to the high-end prices. In other words, those that understood the value proposition were willing to pay the higher premiums.
What’s next?
“Nobody knows we exist”
The current set of customers are primarily agencies building websites for their own site or for other customers. It’s clear that they buy into the value proposition; however, there are still relatively few customers.
Continue iterating
From the first iteration of the product it was clear that assumptions were made, the product launched with those assumptions, some were right some were wrong, and then the product adjusted based on the data. This iterative model will continue to cycle to further hone the business model for the best product market fit. Some of the ideas I was proposing was to consider a Freemium model instead of a trial model.
