Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch, and grow your SaaS business.
This week, I talked to a founder who helps other startups and online businesses do a better job at explaining their products to their customers.
He realized that these companies were working really hard and spending lots of marketing dollars to acquire new customers, but they were also losing a lot of these people because as soon as they tried using the product, they'd get confused and give up.
You've probably had that experience yourself.
I know I have.
So he decided to build a software product to solve that problem.
This is part one of a three part interview, and in this episode we talk about how my guest came up with his startup idea and what he did to turn that idea into a product and business.
All right, today's guest is the co founder and CEO of Chameleon platform that helps with user onboarding for your product.
With Chameleon, you can quickly build, test and deploy product tutorials and tooltips without writing any code.
And it collects analytics to give you the data to help you learn how your users are onboarding so you can use that information to improve the onboarding process.
The company was founded in 2015 and to date has raised $1.9 million in funding.
So today I want to welcome PA Pulkit Agrawal.
Pulkit, welcome to the show.
Guest (01:53.200)
Thank you very much.
Excited to be here.
Omer (01:55.200)
Now I'm very excited because you are a fellow Brit and we are both on the west coast of the US and, you know, I think you have more of an English accent than.
My mind sort of has been fading away over the last 10 or 12 years.
Guest (02:10.640)
Well, I try.
It's a competitive advantage.
It's one I feel guilty about, but I want to make use of it.
Omer (02:18.890)
Oh, you're from England.
Guest (02:19.850)
Cool.
Omer (02:21.930)
Yeah.
I always tell these people this story about going into Starbucks.
Like, the first three months I was here in Seattle and I just wanted a bottle of water.
And the person working, they just could not understand what I wanted.
And I had to say it three times.
And then eventually I had to say, I want a bottle of water.
And then it was like, oh, okay, I get it.
Guest (02:47.490)
So, yeah, well, it's like my first few months and probably still even now, you know, I go into Starbucks and ask for a bottle of water and the conversation is about, oh, you're from England, how's London?
Just give me the water please.
Omer (03:00.370)
So you moved, you moved over to San Francisco.
When?
Guest (03:04.530)
A few years ago?
Yeah, 2013.
Omer (03:08.850)
Cool.
Okay.
So one thing I always like to start by asking my guests is what drives them.
Some people have a quote, some people don't like quotes.
So do you have a quote?
If not, what is it that gets you out of bed every day?
Guest (03:22.870)
I do have a quote.
So it's maybe because it's a simple quote that I can remember it, but here it goes.
When we are conscious of the choices we make in each moment, the future takes care of itself.
And that's a quote by Gautam Chopra, who's son of Deepak Chopra in his book Child of the Dawn.
And that quite resonates with me because it puts a lot of focus on the present moment and it kind of makes the future less uncertain, less unpredictable, less risky because it tells me that, well, the things that are going to happen are being created today.
I resonate with the philosophy of determinism.
And so that's something that always recenters me to, well, what am I doing?
And knowing that I'm the owner of the choices that I'm making today.
Omer (04:09.190)
Did I read in on your about page somewhere that you also meditate?
Guest (04:15.750)
I do, yeah.
I first, I guess growing up in Indian culture, you know, heard of meditation, yoga, etc.
As a kid.
But my first real experience of it was while I was in India doing some social development volunteering work.
And at the end of the time I went on this 10 day retreat, silent retreat for a meditation course where they teach you this technique and it's a non religious technique called vipassana.
And so that's been pretty seminal I think, in helping me stay calm and relaxed and take things and do perspective.
So I'm not shamefully, not as regular as I'd like to be, but it definitely has helped me along in many times.
Omer (04:58.840)
So a 10 day retreat, like nobody talked for 10 days?
Guest (05:02.600)
Like nobody talked for 10 days.
Yeah.
Omer (05:04.600)
Sounds like a fun retreat.
Guest (05:07.320)
It's not very social for sure, but it was great.
People are surprised about the silence thing.
It's not as hard as it sounds.
What it does do is clear space in your head.
So when you're having conversations with people, there are so many new thoughts being generated about those things.
And when you have some quiet from that, you're able to focus a lot more in things that are a little bit deeper.
So you know, I think if you really want a break from this very interconnected and noisy world, that is probably the best place to Go.
Is to really disconnect and focus on yourself.
Omer (05:40.990)
Yeah, I meditate.
I've been doing it for every day for about two years now.
And I can't imagine starting the day any other way now.
Guest (05:47.630)
That's great.
Omer (05:48.190)
It takes time to get.
Get into the.
The rhythm or I guess the habit of doing it, but it's definitely worthwhile.
All right, so we.
I kind of gave the audience a quick summary of what Chameleon is, but tell them in your own words what, what the product is about.
Guest (06:07.950)
Yeah, absolutely.
So the example that I often give is suppose your father or an uncle or somebody signs up for Facebook for the very first time.
You, of course, are very comfortable understanding how Facebook works, but for them it's really confusing.
There's a lot of stuff going on.
There's a lot of different things you can do.
You're not really sure where to begin.
And if you don't understand it, you'll not go back to it.
You'll be overwhelmed.
So Facebook then guides you through some of the key activities that a new user needs to take to really grasp the value of Facebook.
And they might point you in the direction of adding a friend or uploading a picture or something.
And that guidance that in product guidance they build through these tooltips or a tool and they have, you know, big engineering teams, they write the code for it themselves, they, you know, run AB tests, they show variations to users, they collect the data and they have a big effort around it.
But a lot of companies don't have the resources to do that.
And so they really neglect their first time experience or guiding their new users.
And so Chameleon provides a way to build that guidance without writing code, so without being dependent on your engineers for.
Through a wizard that's kind of drag and drop.
So it's very simple for somebody to create this tool and then publish it and you can do all of those other things like show variations or collect the analytics or run tests.
And that will allow you to really improve your onboarding and in product guidance so that most of your new users are successful.
Omer (07:33.550)
How did you come up with the idea for this product?
Guest (07:37.390)
So I used to work with my co founder at another startup and we saw the benefits of improving user onboarding and at that startup and it was a mobile, consumer mobile app.
And we spent two or three months looking and refining our onboarding experience and we saw that not only did activations increase, but long term retention increased a lot as well.
We had something like 3x improvements in retention and it was really obvious to us that a first time experience has a very key impact in a user's engagement with the product.
So that was the first kind of strike where we were like, oh wow, this is substantial and important.
We should be thinking about this before we do more marketing or before we do other product development.
And then once I'd left and I was freelancing for a few other companies, I heard a consistent theme which was, yeah, we need to fix our onboarding.
We'll get round to it.
We haven't had time.
And digging into that a little bit more, it was just found that people didn't really know what good onboarding should be about.
People didn't really have the time or found it difficult to prioritize it when comparing it to core feature development because it all depended on engineering time.
And thirdly, there was no real go to tool or solution.
Now in the world of SaaS there's often for every problem that you have, there's a go to platform to go and solve that problem.
So that didn't really exist at that time.
And so when we were thinking about, well how can we help fix this, such an important aspect of a user experience, we realized that actually with JavaScript technology that was available, we could allow companies to just drop in a snippet and then provide the controls to then build stuff with that snippet in an interface, which is essentially what Chameleon is about.
Omer (09:20.000)
Okay, so you got the idea, you can see the opportunity there.
What did you do to try and validate the idea before you started working on it?
Guest (09:29.920)
Yeah, well, you know, I'd read the books and I'd been to the startup course that you know, YC did at Stanford and it was like, okay, well we gotta get, we're, we've got to validate, you know, got to validate the market, got to validate demand.
So the first approach, and actually around the time when we were thinking of other ideas to the first approach was to spend a month basically talking to people.
So, you know, validating the problem.
Is this a problem that you have so going and just doing informational interviews with anyone in our network or people that we could find be like, okay, how do you do onboarding?
What are your pain points?
How do you solve it?
And very quickly we learned that okay, there is a problem here.
So that was validating the problem.
Like people didn't have a solution.
It was painful.
Then we had this idea, okay, well this is how we think we'll solve it.
So then the process was about validating a possible solution.
And so for that we said the best way to do it really, is to see if somebody will actually give us the reins to do this.
So I remember I, you know, found.
I thought, okay, well, startups are the place to be.
Really early startups.
We have nothing.
It's just two of us.
We're, you know, could essentially be consultants or freelancers.
So I email, cold emailed a bunch of startups, got the YC list and said, okay, well, these are startups that might be going somewhere, and emailed them and told them, okay, well, this is what we're doing.
Would you be interested in this?
And that led to a couple of conversations and eventually one small company said that, yes, they would let us build their onboarding.
And that was good because we were going to have a platform to really test our code and our product.
So we then started building their onboarding and it was part custom and part kind of parameterized into a platform.
So as we were building stuff for them, we would try to abstract that into a platform.
And so we built it for them.
And then we went live and we got some feedback and they told us things that weren't working.
And that was a really great learning curve.
And then from then on, we basically tried to find some other people like that and eventually found a couple of people who were willing to put money behind it and pay us and pay us upfront.
And so that kind of was a slow process towards testing and validating more and more of what we were doing.
Omer (11:37.520)
So you guys weren't working on this full time.
You only started working on this full time fairly recently, right?
Guest (11:45.120)
Yeah, well, I mean, probably for the last year, but we definitely started off, you know, evenings, weekends.
I remember, you know, the first few weeks was like a few hours a week.
And then as we got more interest or as we got more serious, it just started taking up more time.
And so naturally we ended up having to spend more and more time doing this stuff.
And that was the kind of.
It kind of showed us that, yes, there is something that's going to sink more and more time until it got to the point where it was like, okay, we need to do this full time, otherwise we're shooting ourselves on the foot.
People want this, people want more of it.
So how, you know, so we need to switch over.
Omer (12:23.300)
Got it.
Okay.
And initially, at what point did you raise the 1.9 million?
Guest (12:32.100)
So that was after we'd got some customers, we'd gone full time.
What we did was we asked some friends and family, so we didn't have a network in the Valley.
We didn't know really many investors and we didn't have a background or track record of starting companies, so not the best position to go and raise money.
And so we said, okay, well, you know, we need to go full time.
We don't.
Can't really afford to not pay ourselves because, you know, whatever our financial requirements were.
So we asked some friends and family.
So he said, okay, could you, if we need it, could you put some money behind us?
And, you know, out of about 10 people, you know, out of about 10 people committed in a small amount, we had about 40 or 50k that we could take, which we didn't take.
But then we came across an angel investor a little serendipitously around the summer of last year, which then led to our funding round.
Omer (13:25.170)
What has been the reaction to this kind of idea from investors?
Or was that the only investor that you talked?
I mean, how much convincing did you need to do to get the money?
Guest (13:38.930)
You know, it's surprisingly little.
And that's not to disregard the process.
But we met this one angel investor, Arne Hoffman, and I didn't really know much about him at the time.
He was somebody one of my friends had worked for and got us, put us in touch with.
And he talked to us and he got excited really quickly about the idea.
He had a SaaS company that he'd founded and sold recently, and he was familiar with the problem and he then validated the problem with some of his friends.
And we, we must have met four or five times.
And he got to know us a little bit.
And I think at that point he decided and he, you know, he saw the product and he saw some of the customers and we were live.
And at that point he dec, yes, like, this is something I can get behind.
And then I think once he got behind was a lot easier because we had one clear point of validation from someone that was well respected within the investor community.
And at that he introduced us to a lot of other angel investors and we were able to raise kind of a bulk of our seed round from angels very, very quickly.
At that point.
We then said, okay, well, you know, we've got a lot of angel money.
We'd like to get at least one VC on board.
Seed stage, vc, small firm.
And so then we spoke to a few VCs and then that amount as well.
And again, a lot of.
Even they took a lot of their signal from other people that had invested.
So that really helped our cause that they respected the other investors in our
Omer (15:06.880)
Round what is the opportunity here with Chameleon?
It's interesting because I look at the site and a lot of it focuses on, obviously onboarding is one of the kind of the primary keywords when you sort of look at the site.
But at the same time you said, you talked to companies who said, yeah, we need to do onboarding at some point in the future.
So it sounded like it's, it's something that, what is it important but not urgent?
And so there seems to be kind of, is there a sense of urgency for people to come and address this?
Guest (15:54.060)
So I think the way that it's been done typically is because it's a pain to do.
People batch it up into a project that, okay, we're going to work on onboarding this quarter of this year.
Well, actually it's not something that should be done as a standalone project.
It's something ideally you have a team that thinks about all the time or somebody that thinks about all the time because you want to iterate on it over time.
So right now, because it's, we're fairly early in the market demand for this, people don't really always know that there's a solution like this available.
It has been done in kind of batches.
But it is something that everyone thinks about and that's across the board.
At some point someone, every company is going to think about this.
And so there is an opportunity to help every company solve this problem.
And there's potentially a big enough market just with onboarding, but the same kind of product can be used in other situations.
So new user engagement, of course, is a predominant one that we know there's a pain point around.
But actually anytime you release a new feature, feature discovery is a problem.
People don't always know how to educate users about a new feature or publish a blog post or send an in app notification, but that doesn't really handhold or walk the user through the new feature when they need it, when they are ready for it.
So that's a use case.
Similarly, you know, even when people are searching for help, what you see is help sites with screenshots and text and documentation on how to do a certain flow where actually what might be more valuable is pointing someone to a tool which then takes them through that.
So there are other cases for using in product guidance for users.
And beyond that, you know, there's even more that we can do which is around being able to adapt the interface and adapt the UX for different types of users.
So instead of just being on top of the product as a tip or a tool, you can actually start changing the components of the interface again for customer education to help them succeed.
Omer (18:03.320)
That wraps up part one of this interview.
