Pavan(an early stage entrepreneur), Co-Founder of ShieldSquare (www.shieldsquare.com/) is a gold medalist from National Institute of Technology, Warangal and Post-Graduate in Management from Shailesh J Mehta School of Management, IIT Bombay. ShieldSquare helps online portals to protect their content from web scrapers and bots run by competitors and un-authorized 3rd parties.
Pavan recollects the day when he met his prospective customer (CEO of a company) in a conference. He spoke to the person and the person liked the product. Pavan then sent an email and asked that person to introduce him to the right person in his company. Pavan got a connect, presented the idea to the technology head. Since this was one of the first meetings they had with a real customer, they went in with an open mind and asked if there was a real problem that the prospect had which Pavan was trying to solve. The solution was to protect the online content the internet portal had.
It also was evident that every customer was aware of problem of online content security but did not know of the options available and hence thought that content loss was a part of running a business and were contended with the situation. So when Pavan and team went into sell, they had to do double sell, one on the concept and one on their product. So, in this meeting, Pavan offered to do a study to find the quantum of traffic into the site that was stealing data and gave a ROI on how this product will help save the data that the prospect was losing on a daily basis. They went in and implemented the base product, that doesn’t have dashboard and other reports on what is a bad traffic, how much data is stolen etc. And they offered to provide the reports manually on a daily basis. The clients saw the value and immediately signed up as the paying customer.
Pavan’s advice to startups “As long as you are solving a real pain point for a customer, the customers will not bother that you are a startup and will give you the business. “
