When & How to Pivot from one lucrative market to another with Persosa.com personalisation platform co-founder Greg Lim

Big Break Software Podcast

Greg Lim, co-founder of Persosa, talks about coming up with the idea, funding the MVP, finding his first customers, and finding market fit twice. Listen in for the insights.

Persosa is an experience and data platform that enables businesses to boost website conversions by directly speaking to each customer using personalized internal experiences.

The platform also leverages connected campaigns to display customers' needs when they need them. Such efficiency increases conversions, reduce bounce rate, and improves sales. Co-founder and founder Greg Lim talks to Geordie about his journey.

What You'll Learn

• Why brands should personalize their websites
• Why Persosa has two products
• Who is the ideal Persosa customer?
• How Greg and his team priced their product

In this Episode:

When businesses understand their customers, they can utilize that awareness to increase revenue. Greg says they have two key products one of which allows customers to track their customers across different channels. Listen to the podcast for more details about this product.

The second product involves knowing how to convert the understanding you have for your customers into revenue. Greg says they have a personalization medium that enables their customers to utilize the data they collect to; personalize experiences for people visiting their mobile app and website. Persosa also solves two problems in the marketplace, which he explains in depth in this podcast.

In the beginning, Persosa was one comprehensive platform, but the team realized they were almost losing it at some point. They then decided to separate their products to serve their customers better. How do Greg and his team introduce their products to customers?

Understanding the customer and their needs is one of the team's most effective strategies. They always use it before talking about their products which helps them determine the right product that best fits the customer’s needs.

Greg narrates how he became the chief marketing officer of a company by chance and without any marketing experience. During his stint, he had numerous questions but no concrete answers until one day, someone he had met earlier, who also happens to be his co-founder at Persosa, called him and shared with him an idea he had.

That was a defining moment for Greg, seeing that he had been seeking a similar solution and even had a ready client. He quit everything else and joined hands with his co-founder. Listen to the podcast for some background story about Greg's co-founder. His co-founder has tremendous experience in data usage tracking.

At some point, he worked for a small startup company whose product was good. However, they (the company) struggled to discuss and sell their product. When Greg's co-founder came on board, he worked out a solution for them which he later realized was some form of an MVP which could become an entire product and whole platform. It was then that the two colleagues connected.

There are some misconceptions surrounding personalization in today's world, especially in terms of privacy. How does Greg's system work while guaranteeing customers of their privacy? To deliver a personalized and engaging experience, all the team needs is to understand what attracted a potential customer to the website.

Greg supports his answer with an example that you can learn about from the podcast. Together with his team, Greg tracks website performance through geo-location, UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters, and collecting data first, meaning new users only get a personalized experience after a few interactions.

Greg's co-founder enjoys building products. When he was starting, the buzzwords in the industry were real-time data, a term that was frustrating to him but one he relied on to unlock value in real-time.

Greg says his co-founder did not do any market research during the development of his MVP. However, when they crossed paths, the MVP was working, save for a few elements, but they still tried it on Greg’s client. Greg explains the concept of the MVP in relation to what the client wanted and what they did to deliver an exceptional experience.

The lack of a repeatable sales process threw Greg and his team in disarray even though they had already found a product fit. Greg illustrates some of the challenges they faced along the way and what they did to redeem themselves.

The team first pivoted in web personalization before shifting tact after realizing that consumers interact with brands in different places. Greg's co-founder altered the platform to include personalization API, data tracking, and personalization to make it more accommodating. Find out how the system now works.

Along the way, Greg experienced some significant failures. For example, he did not focus on customer acquisition, finding product fit, and learning his customers. Instead, he spent time worrying about how much he would spend on marketing when he was losing huge sums in the real sense.

If Greg were to turn the hand of time today, he would invest more in marketing. He speaks about another important lesson that you can learn from the podcast. Greg concludes the podcast by highlighting the importance of being confident as an entrepreneur. Trust your gut feeling, talk to your customer, know them and find out how they interact with your product, then align that with your vision, says Greg.

Resources

• Persosa
• [e-mail]