Category Archives: Startup

20May / 2013

We are now off on Saturdays

My email sent out this morning to the team:

Getting a life (on Saturdays)

Avlesh
to Ankit, Ravi, Manish, Prashant, Vikas, Aayush, Nitin
Brothers,

First, I am doing good, got back from the hospital, recovered over the weekend and raring to go now. I’ll see you in office today. Thankfully, after a bunch of tests, doctors ruled out any cardiac ailment – so, I’ll stick with you longer than you thought :-d

WebEngage is now a 5 day workplace

Now, on a serious note, I guess its about time to rethink a few things. I don’t know how it works with other people, but for me it took a health scare to get to rethink. All of us have worked incredibly hard to build a respectable company – mind you, we started from zero. And you know how much work has gone into it – code night outs, scalability nightmares, support calls at midnight from the US, crazy sales trips to squeeze 8-10 meetings in a day. We did everything to make it work. However, in doing all of the above, I have pushed each one of you to limits. I now realize that. Sorry mate.

I owe you a gift. I owe you your Saturdays. Go brother, its yours. Do things you like, spend time with your friends and family, let’s go for team outings (yikes, we haven’t had one in an year now!). And, if, you still want to code, come over to my place :-)

We are now a 5 day working company. Yay!

- Avlesh

Bottom-line, we won’t we working on Saturdays anymore starting this week unless its a pre-planned one. Support emails for all the paid plans will still be answered promptly on the weekend. Enterprise plan customers will continue to get uninterrupted 24*7 support as per the SLA.

I have taken this decision to give much needed respite to the team that builds this awesomeness called WebEngage for you. They need love too :-)

- Avlesh

Posted in HR, Startup

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31Dec / 2012

2012 – The Year That Was

WebEngage Rocks In 2012

The year 2012 has shaped WebEngage and we’ll remember it as such. We couldn’t have asked for more. Here’s a quick rundown of some significant updates from the year -

  • WebEngage was launched in Oct, 2011 and we put a price tag on the product in Jan, 2012.
  • Customers complained about an erratic behavior of our survey targeting for Quora visitors. It was an engineering mistake by Quora. We blogged. The post trended on HN and other platforms. Quora had to finally fix the issue. The hacker world took a note of our existence post this event. We loved it!
  • Starting with The Startup Center, we extended our olive branch to a whole bunch of early stage companies by offering them free subscriptions of WebEngage. We continue to live up to our promise.
  • Our search for a mascot begins. Months later we found one. Yeah, CROW it is!
  • First big milestone – 1000 customers reached in Mar, 2012.
  • The feedback tab gets shinier and multi-lingual.
  • The WebEngage WordPress Plugin got a whole lot better.
  • First version of Javascript API released in April, 2012. Customer engagement gets a new meaning.
  • From 30 days to 14 days – we reduced the duration of free trial period for all paid plans in May, 2012. Reasons here.
  • This has to be the BIGGEST event for WebEngage in 2012 – launch of Notifications in Jun, 2012.
  • We raised our seed round from GTI Capital in Jul, 2012. Blume Ventures participated in a secondary purchase. Yeah, the company gets cash rich :-) .
  • We quickly scaled. Served 100 million widget requests in Aug, 2012. A DNS glitch occurs on our end in Oct, 2012. Lessons learnt the hard way.
  • The company turned 2 and WebEngage turned 1. We celebrated. And, in another BIG milestone, we launched a new version of our website. We bagged all the leading e-commerce and travel players as customers. Check out some of our customers and testimonials.
  • Feedback product gets a major face-lift. File attachment support in replies amongst other features were rolled out in Nov, 2012.
  • Our payment partner, 2Checkout, disappoints us. Mastercard payments (new and recurring) were being declined. We suffered huge losses. The issue still continues to haunt us from users in certain geographies including India :-( .
  • We simplified the on-boarding process for WebEngage. The outcome has been fabulous.
  • Another feather in the cap – Notification product gets a major upgrade, with release of Custom Targeting, customers are now addressing the problem of cart abandonment like never before. The feature is selling like a hot cake.
  • 5000th customer signed up in Dec, 2012. Dream come true moment for us.

This is it. We look forward to an eventful 2013. We have set course for a much BIGGER journey. With you, it will be fun. If you haven’t already, do come on-board - this is one ride you don’t wanna miss .. :-)

Stay tuned. We love you!

P.S: In case you missed, we are offering FREE t-shirts for all paid plan sign-ups till the 31st of Jan, 2013. Details here.

Posted in General, Milestones, Startup

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13Oct / 2012

Happy b’day to us. We have turned 2

What a fascinating journey it has been – started with one idea, assembled a tiny team, created an excellent product and had to finally shelve it; then switched to another idea, raised angel money, built an amazing product, gained superb traction, raised another round of capital and here we are – in front of you, standing tall and firm with over 4000 customers worldwide in less than 11 months of publicly launching WebEngage!

Happy 2nd b’day Webklipper (yes, that’s the company which has created WebEngage). Underneath are some pictures from our celebration this morning -

The "sparkle" cake (courtesy Prashant)

Here's to many more such moments. Cheers!

The WebEngage Team (from left to right) - Manish, Avlesh, Vikas, Prashant, Ankit, Prateek

We’ll be celebrating all this month and announcing a lot of goodies for our customers starting next week. Keep a tab on us.

- Avlesh

Posted in General, Startup

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12Sep / 2012

Boy’s Toys

At WebEngage, all of us have peacefully lived with our Dell Latitude laptops for a long long time. In my case – for over 7 years. Things have changed now though. As we are ramping up our team and adding people in Design and UI/UX, having Mac’s became mandatory. We got fresh new supplies of some Apple gadgets – an iMac (27″), 2 Macbook Pro’s (13″ & 15″) and an iPad (16GB). Check out our cool new toys -

Fresh new Mac supplies at WebEngage

Me an my team is already loving it, especially the iMac.

Oh, btw, did I tell you that we are rolling out a brand new website for WebEngage very soon. Yes, now you know :) . We are working hard to make sure that you fall in love with it. Hopefully, these new gadgets will make it simpler for us. I’ll soon come back to you with an update on the new site.

- Avlesh

Posted in Engineering, General, Startup

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04Apr / 2012

[Announcement] Morpheus gang companies to get 6 months of FREE WebEngage subscription

We have said this a gazillion times in the past – we love startups. And we mean it. Literally! We earlier announced freebies for The Startup Centre and iAccelerator & CIIE residents.

Moving forward on our commitment to help fellow startups, we are now elated to announce a 6 months FREE subscription of the Standard Plan for Morpheus gang companies. This offer is for 20 residents on a first-come-first-serve basis.

As on date, over 1200 online business trust WebEngage as their feedback management and in-site survey tool. The young and energetic residents at Morpheus would be a proud addition to the list that has heavyweights like MMT, Yatra, Indiatimes, Park n Fly, Future Group, Cleartrip, Buytheprice, Justeat, Reliance Insurance etc as customers onboard. We believe that WebEngage would help these companies consolidate their offering by getting valuable customer insights. Our best wishes are with these companies. We’d love to see them grow and become immensely successful (so that they eventually start paying for WebEngage …)

We’d like to thank Sameer and Nandini for getting this done.

Stay tuned. We love you!

Posted in Announcement, Morpheus-Tie-Up, Partnerships, Startup

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23Mar / 2012

Cool pitch from a job applicant

This morning, we received a job application. Underneath is the guys pitch (posted verbatim) -

I want to work with you guys because,
♥ You guys are a hardcore techie startup in Java domain.
♥ You guys are working on MongoDB and Relational database !!! Very few startups in India must be doing polyglot persistence ! Thats cool as well as a visionary thing !
♥ Yours is a SaaS product !!
♥ I believe you are creating a nice team which has the potential to become 37 Signals of India with solid usable and meaningful product portfolio !
♥ I am reasonably well at Java and most of the time I think of web scale architectures..!!!
♥ Because I am from Mumbai
♥ Because I am tired of working in a typical IT setup where most of your energy goes wasted in bureaucratic process oriented hell !
♥ Because I feel like home when I visit Web Engage site and read “about us” page ! I just want to be there :)
♥ Because I need a mentor in my life and you guys are perfect for the same !
♥ Because I eat,sleep and drink ideas and its possible implementation.
♥ Because I do believe that working on-line demo without any hassle of registration is the best selling point of a SaaS product..!!!
♥ Because I do believe and think and advocate a lot about restful APIs !
♥ Because I want to master JavaScript ( i know it already but lazy enough to thoroughly learn it , as jQuery and it’s ecosystem spoils your native JavaScript needs :P ) as I believe that is the core of Web App development.
♥ Because I hit “bulls eye” when I search something on Google !
♥ Because I have compiled/understood nice tool set of open source libraries which makes Java development more enjoyable ! Play Framework, JSoup, JOOQ, JDBCHelper.
♥ Because I believe in Web oriented Architecture !
♥ Because I can shoot , track 100s of email communications per day ! Which I already do as I have subscribed to some of the high traffic mailing lists for open source Java libraries.
♥ Because I can complement Team Web Engage and contribute in many meaningful ways !

If you are looking to pitch to a startup for your candidature, this can be a great example of how to do it. We are retaining the identity of this candidate.

Stay tuned. We love you!

Posted in General, Startup

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06Feb / 2012

Startups incubated inside iAccelerator and CIIE (IIM, Ahmedabad) to get 6 months of FREE WebEngage subscription

Hello startups! We love you, simply because we are one of you. 2 weeks ago we announced a partnership with The Startup Centre, Chennai. We are pleased to make a similar announcement for startups incubated inside iAccelerator and CIIE, IIM-Ahmedabad.

WebEngage has committed to offer 15 incubatee companies from these entities, a FREE subscription of WebEngage on first-come-first-serve basis. These startups will automatically be subscribed to the Standard Plan of WebEngage upon signing-up. It would be a pleasure to see these young companies grow along with us [and eventually pay for our service ;) ]. All the best and make the most of WebEngage.

We take this opportunity to thank Pranay Gupta, the Joint CEO at CIIE, for being a great help in seeing this partnership go through.

Stay tuned. We love you!

Posted in Announcement, iAccelerator-CIIE-IIM-Ahmedabad, Partnerships, Startup

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28Jan / 2012

WebEngage partners with The Startup Centre. Offers 6 months of FREE subscription to TSC residents

We love startups. All of them. WebEngage has been the tool of choice for most newly launched web companies to get valuable customer insights. As a startup, there are numerous battles to fight. We get so involved in our daily chores that we kinda ignore one important aspect of being a startup – getting feedback from early adopters and acting upon it. Here we come; with a product so simple yet powerful that you’ll say “oh wow“.

In our quest to help young companies and see them grow with us, we are taking a big leap. We are pleased to announce that WebEngage is now a partner with The Startup Centre, Chennai. All TSC residents are now entitled for a 6 months FREE subscription of the Standard Plan for WebEngage. Being a helping hand gives us a huge sense of gratification. We hope that these companies will make the most out of WebEngage to improve their product offering.

A wholehearted thanks to Vijay Anand, the founder at TSC for reaching out to us.

Stay tuned. We love you!

Posted in Announcement, Partnerships, Startup, TSC-Tie-Up

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20Nov / 2011

WebEngage demo at Unpluggd

WebEngage was one the 10 startups selected to demo at Unpluggd on the 19th of November, 2011. The event was held in Pune, India. This is the presentation we used for our demo.

Do share if you like/dislike. We’d like to thank Ashish Sinha and congratulate the entire PluggdIn Team for getting such amazing speakers and startups on one stage. Kudos!

Posted in Product-Update, Startup

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