From 0 to 3000 customers globally

Yesterday, at least according to LinkedIn, was an anniversary for with Klevu – which made me think that I should write something to thank our customers and reflect a bit on our journey.

Customers
Our ears always remain open to our customers. I must thank all of them, for encouraging us and being with us throughout the journey. They teach us important learning on a daily basis. They bring us so much insight that even after 60+ unique features and capabilities within Klevu, we always feel that we are still on a journey to find new ones. This is a result of our customers engaging with us and our product – talking to our team and sharing their thoughts and feedback.

As a result, every single feature in Klevu has a relationship with a customer’s narrative on what he or she is envisioning to provide an optimal search experience.

Team
Our team is quite unique and they cherish the diversity of culture, experience and skills. It makes us possibly the most diverse Nordic startup in existence.

Diversity is at the core of our team and I feel that it’s one of our strongest attributes.

Together, we share more than 9 languages, 5 nationalities and over 50 years of complimentary experience. Every single team member brings complementary skills and strives to become a leader and an authority. As a result, we continuously help each other and remain a self-organized, collective, trust-based global team that works towards a common goal.

We have been able to benefit from every new member of the team, who is smarter in a specific way than our current team.

Our team has done an excellent job in ensuring that Klevu continues to remain a solution that answers the most complex requirements of our customers, yet still remains the easiest option to integrate and configure. Thanks to an excellent codebase, continuous R&D and our technology automation skills, we remain the most affordable enterprise-grade site search solution in the market.

I would like to thank our CTO, Dr. Niraj Aswani for his technical leadership. He brings a unique combination of excellence in semantic technology and passion for coding. He always gets to the bottom of every issue, irrespective of the customer package, and makes sure it’s fixed for good. This approach to technical leadership is now ingrained in the whole team, earning Klevu very high regard from our partners, coming from our ability to solve problems, irrespective of size and the origin.

Partners
Every developer who integrates Klevu into their store is, in essence, our partner – adding value to consumer discovery. What we’ve achieved so far is a result of a huge contribution from our partners, for example the developer companies who form the bridge between us and merchants in most cases. They have always reached out to us to share what we can improve to further improve our capabilities. With our partners, we remain focused on a common cause, of adding value to our customers. It creates a very unique atmosphere of approaching any challenge in harmony with partners – the rest follows on its own.

Partners collectively form our global extended team!

If you aren’t yet a Klevu partner, team up with us, Please reach out to our CCO, Jussi Rousi.

Personal learning
I have been learning every day from our customers, our team, our partners and Klevu advisors. Here are the three main lessons that probably summarize my learning so far:

• Stay on the ground
  I have personally been investing at least 3-5 days per month in technical support and addressing at least 1 customer demo request that comes via our website – irrespective of the nature of the query. This has helped me to understand our customers, partners and team members.
• Remove obstacles
  Jack Ma said that first comes customers, then team and then investors. I have been mainly following it but from the perspective of removing obstacles.

It pays off a great deal when an obstacle is removed, it sort of creates a win-win situation, without explicitly talking about it.

• Stay calm and address the concern
  Staying calm and doing the best you can help to motivate the whole team. We will, at the end, either succeed or fail, but at least the satisfaction of doing the right thing becomes visible to all of the stakeholders. Staying calm, however, is difficult, and I must say that our team has been taught to not get distracted.

We may at the end succeed or fail with the case, but at least the satisfaction of doing the right thing becomes visible to all stakeholders. Staying calm, however, is difficult, and I must say that our team has taught a lot to not get off trail.

Future
The journey from here on looks very exciting to us. Our goal is for Klevu to power over 10K customers globally in the next 12 to 18 months.

We have a solid team, a working product, good customer base and a huge addressable market.

We aim to be the only search software that can be used by a customer of any size, from a small boutique to a top 50 retailer.

In terms of technology evolution, we will continue to focus on search and discovery in our product road-map. Thanks to our customers and partners, we have a very interesting set of capabilities in our backlog that will significantly improve the consumer’s discovery experience. We will keep going back to our customers and partners to inform them regularly about newly added capabilities.

In our backyard, we have been working very hard to take huge steps forward in developing a technology to revolutionize shopping. We aim to showcase it to our customers and partners by end of this year. Stay tuned with us.

Thanks again to all of you, the journey continues :).

Regards

Nilay
CEO, Klevu
Finland