How did we get our first 100 customers - Corefactors Story

· 3 min read

Recently Corefactors was interviewed by ForGrowth team to talk about our growth story. The interview is reproduced here.


What’s your Startup ?
Our Startup is called CoreFactors.
Teleduce is our product. Teleduce is an integrated platform to manage Marketing Communication and Lead Conversion.
Teleduce enables SMS, Email and Voice channels for Marketing. We provide features like integrated content development and management, campaign management, tracking leads, lead management and communication management.


How did your startup happended ?
Corefactors was founded in 2013 with a simple mission: to create superbly engineered marketing and communication solutions.
Corefactors was bootstrapped for first 2 years.
Our Product team spends more time on understanding the problem.

We initially learned about our domain and its pain points by reselling other existing products in the market. Our MVP was built after a year of reselling existing products.

Product “Teleduce” was born on May 16 2014.


What growth hacks you used to get your first 100 customers ?
We literally had INR 0 budget for marketing on start.
We had a premium subscription(3 months later) in JustDial to receive leads which was around INR 15K. It was our first channel to receive leads.

Post to that, we only used traditional and consistent lead channel called referral.

Many of our customers are referred by our customers. Our lead source was just dial and referral only for first 12 months.


How did you grow your customers later ?
Helping our customers to achieve results was the only way we used to grow our customer base.

We have very high customer stickiness and referrals because of our support and attitude towards achieving results for customers.


How do you monetize ? What is your current revenue ?
We have 2 ways of monetization

  • SAAS Model – Customers Pay for subscription period
  • Customers Pay as per the usage of marketing & communication channels and their credits

Our revenue growth is steady YOY. First year revenue was INR 23 lakhs (~40k$). Currently our revenue is clocking INR 1.6 cr (~250k$) for 2016-2017 FY.


What major challenges you faced in the early days ?
Positioning our product among competition was our major challenge. Without clear differentiation and ROI, it was very difficult to survive. Very soon we created our USP of integrated marketing and communication platform.


If you have to start all over again, what will you do differently ?
Creating a framework to track every critical number in the business from day one. It would create visibility about our growth and help us understand our finance and cash flow better.


What is the most important insight in your venture ?
When you don’t understand the domain completely, learn & experience it first before starting to work on the product idea.


What is your startup tech stack ?
Application is built on Python (Django) / Postgresql stack. Hosted on AWS and other PaaS solutions. Using 100% open source solutions.


What are your biggest accomplishments so far ?

  • Development of Teleduce 2.0
  • Our INR 1cr revenue target was our bigger accomplishment so far.
  • Corefactors was listed on “Top 20 Marketing technology company in India” on Dec 2015 by CIO Review.
  • Corefactors has been awarded as Hot 100 Technology(2017) Company in India.

Who are your marquee customers ?


What are your future goals for CoreFactors ?

  • Implement machine learning techniques in our Marketing solutions for better results.

What tools, resources are most used in your startup ?


What are your favorite books & podcasts ?


How to reach you ?
Phone — +91 080 67335577
E-Mail — info@corefactors.in / support@corefactors.in
Try Teleduce