This is a story of Pudding — a startup that grew out of ambition to solve real challenges in B2B technical evaluation and sales process.

Idea — The beginning:

If you are a part of sales team that sells cybersecurity, networking, Storage, IoT or any product that goes through evaluation before closing the sales, then you would have gone through the grueling, painful and unpredictable process, known as Proof of Concept. Before founding Pudding, When I was working as a sales engineer, I often wondered why POCs are so complex and difficult to manage. Why are sales teams using the same old tools and methods when those POCs can make or break company’s revenue stream?

There had to be a better way! So in Oct 2018, we started building Pudding with the mission to make POCs easy to manage and predictable for both sales teams and their customers.

Product launch and validation:

Before product launch in April 2019, Idea of Pudding seemed great. POC pain points were real but we wanted to be sure that POC visibility and management is a widespread problem. We wanted to be sure that Pudding provides substantial value to its users and not just incremental add-on to existing tools and methods.

So, early this year in February as we were getting ready to launch the product, we started reaching out to real audience, and pitched our product. Almost everyone we pitched to — they validated that POC visibility and management is a problem. Getting validation from our target users was a relief and exciting at the same time, but what blew our mind away was the number of demo requests we received.

Growth phase:

We followed through those demo requests. Many of those demos converted into our early customers. We have been lucky to see amazing support. Sales engineering community has been vital in spreading the word and providing feedback. As a result, Pudding has been growing consistently month over month. Here are some interesting numbers:

• Our MRR has been growing consistently in double digits
• Our team size grew more than 100% in the last 1 year.
• We didn’t spend any $ on outbound marketing. It has been mostly organic and referrals.
• We expanded into second office few months ago.

Customers:

Customers are the center of our universe. They have been our biggest supporters. We listened to customer’s feedback and followed through by adding features and functions into the product that our customers desperately needed.

• At least 50% of our roadmap items come through our customers.
• Even with small team, we delivered new features related to POC management almost every two weeks including giant features such as native Salesforce, Slack and Zapier integrations.
• After every release, our customer reported issues have been low to none.
• We built knowledge base, integrated communication channels such as Intercom, Zendesk so our customers can easily communicate with us.

Plan 2020:

In 2020, one of the goal is to make POC data easily accessible anywhere, which means:

• going mobile on both iOS and Android platforms
• provide exceptional user experience in both mobile and web platforms
• More APIs and integrations
• and lot more that we can’t write in a public post

We are also working on some really interesting product ideas. Our dev, QA and CS teams will continue to grow to support the needs of our customers.

Thank you notes

Finally, we wanted to share our thank you notes. So, here they are:

• Thanks to our customers who believed in us. Without you, this journey wouldn’t had been as exciting. Your trust in us matters a lot.
• Thanks to people in sales engineering community, who have been talking to us and have been instrumental in providing feedback.
• Thanks to everyone who heard our pitches patiently, saw our demos and spent time with us. It may not seem much to you, but your feedback was very valuable for us.

We are thankful to all of you !