Our Journey As Co-founders, we had a long association in one of the big five corporations of the world. We decided to start with IT Services area. We also wanted to spin-up a product track six months down the line. We incorporated in Jan 2017 & started offering custom ERP solutions in a boot-strap model to global customers. But we couldn’t start the product track as planned even after two years. The experience from our IT Services helped us finalize the idea for INCOX (Workflow Automation Product) in a SaaS model. By Sep 2019, we released our first MVP (v1.0) and got 50 trial sign-ups which never materialized further. Based on feedback, we decided to publish (v2.0) in Slack App Directory to determine if, there is a need for our product. Today we are live in Slack Marketplace!!

Our Struggle, Hope Determining Product Market Fit (PMF) is our challenge. We position business user as the primary persona.It is not clear if this is desirable by SMB owners or they prefer having knowledge worker assistance. Our hope with v2.0 release is to get feedback from SMB customers which will help us establish PMF.

Funding We got interest from couple of investors for debt financing.Our stance was to get funded by a VC/angel who can support us in our growth. We are actively looking for an interested investor while we are focusing on acquiring customer traction.

Conclusion Our top 3 learning: -Product/Services:It is better to start with a product idea. -Time/Money:It is good to have money at your disposal if you start late. -Success:Corporate success can't guarantee start-up success.

Ask to Community Did we miss anything obvious? Leave your feedback.Check our product at https://slack.com/apps/A012ACE2ZV5-incoxbot Thanks for Reading.