Getting established - The Icarus and Phoenix moments of a tech founder

With a base product at hand but no clients to show, it was really time to create some kind of brand for the company so I could start drumming up some business. This is not a straightforward approach when you’re first launching a company so many mistakes were made here but also a lot of good things where done. My plan at this point was to:

1.????? Become a registered partner with Microsoft

2.????? Enhance our product and launch it on the Microsoft market place

3.????? Establish partnerships with other vendors

4.????? Cold mail and calling to any potential lead

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Becoming a Microsoft Partner

Before I could start pushing any kind of services, it was important to me that DAG became a verified MS partner as I could use this as a selling point and make it easier for me to get buy in o DAG as a business instead of “just” buy in to me as a person. This point would prove to be one of the hardest to overcome when trying to sell services later.

Fortunately, the path to becoming a partner registered Microsoft partner is fairly straightforward. So after paying a few registration fees and complete a series of training sessions DAG was now a Microsoft Partner approved to publish products on Microsoft’s marketplace.

Enhancing and launching our first product

With our credentials in place, it was now time for me to invest in the products which where currently simple prototypes. I wanted to include out of the box integration with selected expense and time management systems. After a few trial and errors from a resourcing perspective, I was luckily enough to connect with Vishal (Technical Director) who understood my vision and was able to technically solve the challenge, since then he has also been instrumental in the development of the product roadmap at DAG.

But with fully functioning products at hand it was time to publish them on the Microsoft marketplace, which introduced a whole set of new challenges I hadn’t thought to much about. Marketing material for the products, logos, instruction videos, description, branding of documents etc.

A steep learning curve but also a very enjoyable one, as we in the end launched our first 2 products for D365 FO on the Microsoft marketplace.

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Establishing partnerships

With our products on the marketplace the hope was obviously that clients would start pouring in, anyone with experience in the space of enterprise software will now this is a pipedream. So I had to find alternative ways of getting our products out there. One way and this has later proven to drive a lot of our product sales was to reach out to the suppliers we had created integrations to and becoming an official partner with them, after demonstrating to them how we could ensure a tight, secure and easily deployable integration into D365FO for their software.

Their internal sales teams would then be able to refer customers to us, if they wanted to integrate to Microsoft’s D365 Finance system.

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Contacting everyone

Now a fully fledged product company (without any clients), it was now important to drive in customers. Not just for the products but also for the kind of services I had spent most of my career delivering at large organisations around the world.

I’m not a natural sales person, but in the end, I had to swallow my own ego and decided I just have to go for everything I could think of in order to bring in a client.

This is also where a lot of toes were stepped on, which I’m not apologetic for at all as I still see it as necessary when starting a new company from scratch.

-????????? Reaching out to everyone in my LinkedIn network telling them about either project deliver services or our products.

-????????? Scanning job postings, so I could identify potential clients that I could sell services to.

-????????? Going through every competitor published customer cases on their website to identify clients, hoping I could reach out to them at a point where relationships might have gone sour.

-????????? Listing management consulting firms that might be advising clients on the selection of implementation partners.

Getting our first clients

Looking back at the lists I compiled, I had identified more than 600 people as potential leads and had used a lot of effort in digging their contact details out.

Roughly every 10 people would come back with a reply, furthermore only 1 in 10 of those would be somewhat positive. There was a lot of F*** off and calls from establish consultancies that I should back off.

Today I have so much respect for people who does cold calling and mailing as this requires some serious tough skin to do day in and out.

From the 600+ people I contacted, I now had a handful that had replied in a positive manner. With one of them the stars aligned, this was a global renewable energy company, their relationship with the current partner had gone from bad to worse, they were starting the process of selecting a new expense management system, which we could provide an integration for and last, but not least, I already understood some of the challenges renewable energy companies has from a technical perspective.

They hired DAG to provide system advisory services and to help with the selection of a new expense management system, we now had our first client.

All articles "The Icarus and Phoenix moments of a tech founder"

01 – Introduction

02 – The Idea

03 – Getting established

04 – Growth Pain

05 – Re-structuring

06 – Recovering

07 – The future