First Customers·Thomas Kunjappu, Cleary

Cleary: Transitioning from Custom-Services to SaaS Product Success

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Thomas Kunjappu is the co-founder and CEO of Cleary, an employee experience platform or modern intranet for hybrid teams.

In 2017, while at Twitter, Thomas and his co-founder Ryan noticed that large tech companies often developed in-house tools to improve the employee experience.

They had an idea: Why not create a solution for these companies before they even think about building their own tools? That's how Cleary was born.

But instead of building a product, the founders took a different approach.

They leveraged their network to pitch the idea to the team at Square, offering to build a solution while keeping ownership of the intellectual property.

For the next 2 years, the founders focused on just one customer.

This helped them get started, but it also created challenges when they wanted to shift from a service to a product that would meet the needs of lots of customers.

Eventually, they had to stop accepting ongoing feature requests from Square and concentrate on building a genuine product they could sell to other customers.

Currently, Cleary is doing over $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and has raised $7.5 million in funding. Their customer list includes notable companies like Door Dash, Scale, and of course Square.

This episode is part of our First Customers series.

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