How a 3-people team outworked companies with 30 developers

It’s just incredible what you did with only 3 people. This is massive work done here.

One of our customers was astonished by the work we have done with only three people, so this is why I decided to share with you the whole story behind it and how we did it.

Of course, I can’t predict how many developers a huge company needs to build such a product but still, working with many enterprises, I can quite guess.

I’m the CEO of Customerly, an incredible software that is helping more than 3.000 companies around the world. Our mission is to help 1 billion people and we are still far from this achievement. As of today, we are impacting 1.000.000 people per day.

The challenge

Building the Best-in-Class Customer Lifecycle Software. We wanted to centralize the Customer Support, Email automations and customers feedback in one place. And we did it.

After just 16 months of work, with most of the work done in the night time or weekends, we released our first beta on the market. Oh, and by the way, without having any investment.

The first beta had:

1. Live Chat with Help Desk
2. Email Template builder
3. Automation system
4. in-app survey system

A huge quantity of work for an MVP.

What level of effort is needed if you want to build Customerly?

• 44 repositories on Bitbucket
• +10 coding languages
• +1.000.000 code lines
• +25 running servers
• 2 native mobile apps

It’s like building the Empire State Building with a team of 11 people. The challenge was extremely hard and here is how we did it.

First of all, there was little time. We worked remotely from 9 pm to 3 am almost every day and for the whole weekend for months.

How did we optimize the time and resources to achieve this result?

To build this huge machine with three people, remotely and only at night time was a hard challenge. We started to build and release the things we needed first.

1. Passion: We are passionate about what we do, and the passion has driven every feature we added. #stayhungrystayfoolish

2. Lean Startup: We created, released, learned and repeated. Again and again.

3. Tools: We met every night at the same time for years on appear.in (now Google Meet), used Google Docs to share project details and roadmap, Wunderlist as To-do list (now Asana).

4. Time optimization: Our calls used to be based on what had been done, what we had to focus on, setting up goals and developing the product. Back in the days, the three of us could be on a call where the topic was actually only relevant to two of them. This was inefficient and time-consuming. We have come a long way since then. We have optimized this process to use time wisely. We now have one call per week called Customerly Continuous Growth, where we have a checkpoint of everything done and a discussion about the main features. Then, the team works separately in smaller teams.

5. Team selection: I’m so lucky to have the best engineers on my team. We have carefully selected a team to create a perfect machine. Each one of us has different and complementary skills: UX, UI, design, server architecture, and AI. Combined these all together and you will create a wonderful product like ours. Now we are 6 crazy and passionate people.

6. Find people passionate about what you are doing: Months after the beginning of this amazing journey, two more people jumped on the team. Those people are incredible at what they do every day. You can recognize the passion in their actions.

7. Find strategic people that will use your beta: Our first beta users were what pushed us to work faster. If nobody uses your product, you can take it easy. if your customers’ business depends on your product, then you are even more motivated too.

Conclusion

We are acquiring users for free since the very first day without investing a single euro on advertising. Today we hit 3000 users with more than 1870 widgets integrated worldwide.

You can build with a small team of skilled and passionate people what huge companies are building with hundreds of developers. We are the living proof that it’s possible.

If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.

What’s your biggest challenge you are facing with your business right now? Share it in the comment below.