0 → 200 customers in a year while pivoting twice. The full story of BuddiesHR 🧵 𝗔𝗰𝘁 𝗜 - 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁 A year ago, my co-founder Fabien and I started from scratch to build a new company. We had many questions, but we knew our mission: to make employees happy at work. So, we did what experienced B2B entrepreneurs do: we started with customer discovery. (Yeah, we learned from our mistakes) In our first call with an HR Leader, she told us that her day started with checking the ATS for birthdays and work anniversaries to post on a public Slack channel. We found it unusual, but 3 out of 10 leaders told us the same thing. BOOM 🥳 We had our first product idea! A week later, Billy (the birthday bot) was born. We quickly onboarded our first users and turned them into paid customers, but we realized this wasn’t the billion-dollar company we aimed to build. 𝗔𝗰𝘁 𝟮 - 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝗽𝗶𝘃𝗼𝘁 While building Billy, we continued customer discovery calls, searching for our billion-dollar idea. We repeatedly heard about the need for recognition. After investigating, we saw the market was saturated but lacked clear options for SMBs. Woohoo, we can now pivot to build the recognition platform for SMB 🔥 Two weeks later, in mid-July 2023, Seed.hr was born. As usual, we onboarded our first users and turned them into paid customers. But this time, something was different. It wasn't working as we expected. We had many hypotheses about why. In the end, we discovered that our pricing wasn't suited for SMBs. We also realized that building a billion-dollar company in this space might be tough. The hype was down for us 📉😔 We took some time to think and... 💡 What if we build a more affordable version of Seed, merge it with Billy, and add other features to help companies create their dream culture? 𝗔𝗰𝘁 𝟯 - 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗶𝘃𝗼𝘁 We were back to what we do best with Fabien: building software. In a few months, we launched 4 new Slack apps: → Alfy - Random Coffee Chat → Clappy - Kudos, Praise & Shoutouts → Linky - Org Chart → Pulsy - Polls and Surveys Then we thought: what if we stop promoting them separately and package them under one name? That's how BuddiesHR was born! #Entrepreneurship #Pivot #Startups #WorkplaceCulture ________________________________ 👋 Hey, my name is J.Y, and I develop Slack apps at BuddiesHR to help badass companies (like yours) create the culture they’ve always dreamed of! 💬 I write about entrepreneurship, employee engagement, and, of course, how to create an amazing culture. 👉 Follow me for more content like this!